We stayed in the Isla Verde area of San Juan, an area known for its excellent beaches, and they didn’t disappoint.  Not surprisingly, it is also home to many of the resorts in San Juan and we slummed it in one of the cheaper rooms of one of the nicest hotels, the El San Juan.  Situated on prime beach real-estate, the views in and around the hotel were beautiful.

After flying in, we quickly made our way to the hotel and found it very similar to the Casino-Hotels in Las Vegas.  Regretfully, that included a lack of affordable dining.  Each meal we consumed in the hotel cost between $40-100 — ouch!  The Palms steakhouse, La Piccola Fontana, and even the so-called casual dining Galleria Pizza & Trattoria were all bank-busters.  Other than the cost, the biggest challenge we had was finding decent, at least somewhat authentic, Puerto-Rican food.  Christina tried several dishes but almost all were a huge disappointment.  Luckily, on our trip to Old San Juan, we found the El Patio de Sam which exceeded her expectations.

Though my life doesn’t revolve around my next meal as it does my somehow-ridiculously-petite wife, Old San Juan was also one of my favorite parts of the trip.  We visited there on our first full day by taking a $0.75 bus which also let us see much of downtown San Juan.  Afterwards, we wandered the streets of Old San Juan, walked along the beachfront walls, and visited El Morro, each of which were great and worth a visit by themselves.  The views from the fort of El Morro were even more stunning than the views from the hotel.

The rest of the vacation, we simply lounged around our hotel, relaxed on the beach, hung out around the awesome pools at the hotel and pretty much had an awesome time.  The people of Puerto Rico must be trying to challenge Bhutan for happiest place on earth as the people there were universally, without exception, some of the nicest people Christina or I had ever come across.

No trip could be without a few mishaps and this was no exception.  Almost immediately upon arrival, I received numerous emails & texts notifying me that “hey, one of those things we rushed out the door before I left didn’t quite deploy correctly” — nothing like tech support to kick off a vacation!  At least I found out quickly if my cell got service there.   Also, we had booked this flight on US Airways just like our previous flight to St Louis.  If we hadn’t booked it earlier, we would definitely have chosen a different airline — it wasn’t quite as bad as our previous trip but it certainly wasn’t good either.  I almost feel sorry for the people who work for US Airways.  Lastly, though the hotel impressed in most ways, the room decor was a bit disappointing.  The photos of the rooms on the website were certainly taken from the updated rooms… and ours wasn’t one of them.  This was more of an issue for Christina but it would have been nice to have a modern look & feel instead of the out-of-place furniture we had in our room.

All in all, Puerto Rico was awesome.  We barely scratched the surface of San Juan, much less the rest of the island.  e.g. Who knew there was a rainforest in Puerto Rico?  That’s one of the places we have planned for our next visit…  which can’t come soon enough.

All of the photos of our trip can be found here.

I’m living the hypocrisy so I can appreciate the tax benefits from being married… but I don’t understand why I deserve those tax benefits.  Regardless, not only taxes but health care, visitation, power of attorney, inheritance, citizenship… all of these are heavily influenced by your marital status.  The religious folks out there believe marriage is sacred… but it seems  but in the past month, I’ve had two friends reveal their marriage plans.  Neither was due to any dying desire to rush into marriage — it was simply for the health care.  A business transaction, nothing more.

It seems to me that if marriage is a sacred institution, which it should be, it should be removed from government supervision.  I’m not the only one who seems to think this way.  Replace it with a legally binding agreement unrelated to the religious ceremony known as marriage.  Marriage can then remain a bond between a husband and wife and the government can legislate w/o getting bogged down in the religious ramifications of laws.

While the Facebook community revolted, as they do each time Facebook changes, I think the whole idea of “life streaming” is fascinating. I learn a lot more about my friends by observing their behavior and activity online than I do from “Likes”, “Dislikes”, “Relationship Status”, etc (the typical stuff found on a social network).

Even better than viewing miscellaneous status updates from my friends are viewing the items they find interesting.  I use Google Reader to aggregate news and it has a built-in method for quickly sharing articles from the web.  That is automatically displayed to all my friends and vice-versa when they find interesting articles.  I use Reader more than even Search or Maps.   The feed of items along the right pane or via the “My Life In Links” tab above is an RSS feed of my Google Reader Shared Items.

The consistent problem with life streaming is that activity on one online site doesn’t show up on my activity at another site.  There are any number of approaches to resolve this including propagation websites like Ping.fm, aggregators such as FriendFeed, multiple site-posting functions in applications, and any number of others.  They all have varying degrees of usefulness but all seem to be lacking in some way.

In the meantime, I’ve been testing various items.

• Google Reader RSS/Atom Feed or click the “My Life In Links” above.
  
• FriendFeed or click the “FriendFeed” tab above.

That evening, Christina and I reverted back to our childhoods and went sledding.  Well, her childhood at least — I don’t think I ever went sledding when I was a kid.  The first time I ever went skiing was in college with my uncle.  I loved skiing and Christina and I had a blast sledding.  Our community has a great location for sledding even though, off to the side, there are a few hazards that Christina and I attempted to run into a few times.  Definitely prefer human sledding over car sledding, however.

Anyway, I then had to head out for my company’s (very early) Christmas party.  My company always does something a little different than most — we can get away with it since we’re so tiny — and this year we had a bowling outing and then dinner at McCormick and Schmick’s.  It was fun despite my worst bowling game ever — need to do Wii Bowling next year so I can show them up.

After dinner I was finally able to get in a co-op game of Left 4 Dead.  All I can say is that it lived up to my expectations.  Exceeded them.  Chris, Frank, Lucas, and I teamed up and played through the No Mercy level and I can honestly say I’ve played few games that were as non-stop intense as Left 4 Dead.  The forced co-op works as advertised;  You simply cannot wander off alone no matter how good you are because the zombies will overwhelm and kill you in less than a minute.  The game is extremely polished with a lot of attention to detail, plenty of humor, and just an all around well-made game.  The other highlight is that each play-through is completely different due to the “AI Director” who randomizes everything on the level and adjusts based on the current status of your progress.  Very cool concept and adds tons of replayability.

Sunday was a bit more tame as I met my sister Erin in Fredericksburg to swap the van for my Celica.  So very glad to have my Celica back — it might not be the fanciest car in the world but it suits me perfectly.  The evening was wrapped up with a birthday dinner for Christina’s grandmother.  Whew!

Speaking of college football, due to the crazy parity (and mediocrity) of the ACC conference this season, VT is somehow going to the ACC Championship game this Saturday.  They will match up against BC – Sound familiar?  That’s right — all of the twists and turns, the unexpected upsets, the week-by-week changes in division leaders… at the end of the season, the exact same teams from last season are playing for the ACC conference championship.  Surprise!

Now that the college football season is winding down, I finally got a new TV for my basement.  My too generous mom dragged me out to Circuit City on Black Friday and coerced me into picking out a new TV for my downstairs “man cave.”  After moving into the townhouse a bit over a year ago, I had given up my nice HDTV for the living room upstairs and had made do with a 19″ monitor down in my basement that was also hooked up to one of my computers. No more — I’m back to the sweet goodness of a big HDTV.

There was a catch, of course.  My car, which is ideally sized for me, is not quite as ideally sized for an HDTV.  I had a few different options for transferring the TV back to my townhouse but in the end, I settled on my mom’s minivan.

My mom will tell all who listen that the minivan she has, a Mazda MPV, is the only minivan that drives like a car.  She may be right but whichever car it is that it drives similarly to… well, it is definitely not a Toyota Celica.  While it’s a very nice vehicle in it’s own right, I just can’t get past the notion that I’m driving around in a minivan.  On the other hand, my mom can’t stand driving around “an inch from the ground” in my car either so I guess it’s good that we’re supposed to be swapping back next weekend.  I’m just glad I hadn’t chosen to borrow my uncles truck.

Christina and I made it down just in time to catch the latter half of each of their soccer games.  There is a dramatic difference in their approach to the game: Abigail is a non-stop motor, devoted to the game, and a true athlete in training.  Samantha has a much more lackadaisical interest in the game and is much more focused on being subbed out so she can get more juice boxes and snacks.  After they came off the field, Abigail was more interested in playing laser tag and basketball while her sister kept cornering people so that she could play “pretend”.  Samantha does a great kitten impression and seems to find no limit to the scenarios she can dream up.

There was one more birthday for which I was asked to visit Richmond for and that was my own.  Living up to his reputation, my uncle Steve showed up at Texas de Brazil ready to embarass me.  Texas de Brazil is not exactly a “low brow” restaurant and I’m sure the wait staff appreciated stepping over the inflatable walker extolling my new age and numerous infirmities.  It was good for a laugh, though.  I did snag a copy of Spore as a present so I’ll probably be writing about that in the near future… that is, as soon as I have a free bit of time to play it.

You would have no idea the economy was in the dumps by the amount of construction out in Vegas. CityCenter, in particular, was ridiculous. The Venetian is still my favorite casino — I’m sure the excellent poker room there has nothing to do with it. They expanded the Venetian to add the Palazzo and the Wynn had added the Encore since I had visited last. I guess there are always people willing to go out and gamble though I don’t know how people can afford to stay at some of these casinos.

The last time Christina and I were in Vegas, we did a television screening where we rated tv shows using a little dial. You don’t know what show(s) you’re going to see until you’re in there but we ended up watching clips from 3 primetime comedy shows. The only one I remember was “How I Met Your Mother” with Doogie Howser but overall, it was actually kind of fun and interesting. Anyway, as we walked through MGM on Saturday, we talked it up a bit and so the 5 of us decided to do it again. As luck would have it, we ended up screening “Wellington” — some reality show Animal Planet is developing. I thought for sure it was another reality show MTV was creating and was a bit stunned that Animal Planet was the channel behind it. Imagine The Hills or Laguna Beach merged with horse shows… if you can imagine such an abomination. I dialed up “0″ from the get-go and rode it until the very end of the 40 minutes of my life that I will never get back.

Our overnight flight back was fairly uneventful and we got in about 5am on Sunday morning. After a nap, the rest of the day was spent doing yard work and watching football. Early to bed last night and now I’m back to the daily grind.