Chris Moody’s Blog

Absent Memories

Just finished reading the book Absent Memories: Moving forward when you can’t look back. A fascinating first hand account of a 47 year-old women who lost all of her memories, and the 9 years since. A college graduate, a black belt, and former member of the National Guard, Beki Propst struggles to re-learn the most basic rules of social interaction, much less the skills to keep a steady job. Her view of life through new eyes sheds light on the things we take for granted.

The author loses all of her “declarative memory”.  After her loss, she still remembers how to do many of the ingrained daily rituals, like driving a car, but she couldn’t describe the rules of the road.  As she describes it in the book, “A computer geek might have said that I’d lost lost some data from my hard drive, but my operating system was apparently unaffected.”

Checking in at 117 pages, this book is a quick read, but well worth it.  You find it at Amazon.com here (or I’m sure anywhere else books are sold or borrowed).

While on vacation, I decided to take my family to SkyVenture Colorado for indoor skydiving in their big vertical wind tunnel. Pretty fun stuff!

I’m going to my first ever hockey game tonight.  That’s professional, amateur, or otherwise.  Kurt called to say that he had extra tickets… and expensive ones at that.  Apparently the food and drink will be free.  Maybe I could get into this sport!

Just returned from a big vacation with my family. It started early on a Saturday morning with me getting up at 3:30am to catch a plane to Denver. I met up with my parents, some extended family, and Kabinett neighbors to board another plane to Orange County.

In the O.C., we spent two days at Disneyland. We hit most of the staple rides. Star Tours, Thunder Mountain, Pirates of the Carribean, Indiana Jones Adventure, the Haunted Mansion. I bought my dad a Capt. Jack pirate hat with dreadlocks and he promised to wear it the whole day. He didn’t disappoint, getting lots of great looks and comments from kids and adults alike.

Monday rolled around and we all piled into a shuttle van to take us to L.A. (well, San Pedro) to board Royal Caribbean’s Monarch of the Seas cruise ship. After settling into our cabins, we met in the dining room where my dad was wearing his pirate hat and commenting on “meeting up with some friends later.” After dinner I went to one of the night clubs to watch people make fools of themselves singing karaoke.

Tuesday morning rolled in and not being used to noises of a ship, I woke before sunrise and went up top to take picture of our arrival into San Diego. We passed a few other vessels on the way in, including a submarine, the USS Ronald Reagan, and an aircraft carrier that was pretending to be the WWII version of the USS Enterprise (is there a movie being made?).

Our excursion into San Diego was a whale watching trip. We boarded the Marietta headed back out to a noticeably more turbulent sea. It took us a while to find a whale, but saw sea lions sunning them selves on a channel buoy, and dolphins bow running our boat on the way. To be honest, I thought they were more exciting anyway. The whale just shot up a spout, showed us his tail and then disappeared for 5 minutes before repeating the process.

The evening was filled with me donating some money to the casino and going up to watch the fools singing karaoke again. But this time I discovered it was much more fun to watch after two amaretto sours.

Wednesday started with us pulling up to Catalina Island… but not docking. Our ship was too big for their port so we were ferried to the island on little tenders. I made the mistake of signing up for a snorkeling excursion in the first week of March. Granted they did provide wet suits, and granted the wet suits did help tremendously, but my hands were completely numb by the time I got out of the water. About the only thing making that excursion worth while were all the gals in bikinis (before they put their wet suits on).

I skipped dinner in the dinning room that night in favor of the buffet instead. After that I caught the tail end of a show in the auditorium (a musical impressionist). After that was over I went to go laugh at the karaoke singers again, but they were getting much better which meant I was clapping more than laughing.

Thursday came with us docking in Ensenata, Mexico. I had an excursion scheduled for something to do with Fox Studios down there, but discovered that half of the 5 hour tour was spent driving to and from the location. So I skipped it in favor of reading by the pool, watching a movie in my cabin, and finding an internet connection.

Breakfast and lunch had been buffets in the Windjammer Cafe as usual, but I was back to the dinning room for our final dinner. I ordered my 2nd steak of the week, the wait staff danced for us, and we passed out our gratuities.

Evening entertainment started with karaoke that night, since it had been moved up several hours. Almost everyone was great on the last night. There were some I wouldn’t be surprised to see on American Idol next season (if I actually watched that show).

Following that, was an entertaining hour of “The Quest”. Essentially the host called out a item, and a drunk team member had to rush up to the dance floor with said item. Things progressed from common items like our “Sea Pass” cards, to men wearing lipstick, to men wearing women’s shoes, to women holding men’s jeans, to men holding women’s bras. It all ended with guys from the audience standing on stage in their boxers shorts wearing almost all of the aforementioned ladies items. That was good for a laugh and made me glad that I didn’t join a team as I happened to be wearing briefs that night.

And that was just about it. Lots of waiting on Friday. Waiting in line to get off the ship, waiting in line for US Customs, waiting for our shuttle to LAX, waiting in lines at the airport, waiting for my plane. I was glad to get home. And I was glad that I didn’t have to wait for Nicole to pick me up.

Click below for my photos on Flickr.

I’ve just spent my first full day on vacation in Colorado with Kurt and Monica. We took the cog railroad up Pike’s Peak, we sprinted through Garden of the Gods, and we had a family dinner. A nice full day.

Tomorrow we see the Colorado Rockies take on the San Francisco Giants, and then drive up to the Kabinett. Hopefully we can relax and sleep in once we’re up there.

Click my Photos link in the menu if you’d like to see the pictures.

BSG just dropped several bombshells on us and is now unkindly going on hiatus until Jan. 2008 and I’m just a tad bit pissed off. No spoilers here, but I saw one of the bombshells coming. And I think so did everyone else that really follows the show. Even if they didn’t actually show that bomb going off. Now… what to do until next year!

I saw this movie last weekend. It was pretty fun, and had more depth to it than what they showed in the trailer. It was also nice to see Will Ferrell finally playing a new character.

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Get it while it’s still on YouTube!! It’s the movie trailer for the July 2007 Harry Potter film, Order of the Phoenix. Filmed with a camcorder in a movie theater, so not the quality sucks, but at least you get the idea.
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Well, I’m sitting here on a Saturday afternoon pondering the last day and a half of my 2-week vacation. How can I make the most of my remaining days? What can I do that I won’t get the opportunity to do once I’m back at work? Unfortunately, taking another nap will just screw up my sleeping routine even more.

But, alas, it’s been a pretty good vacation. For the second year in a row, I watched the CO Rockies play the Chicago Cubs. I spent several days relaxing at the Kabinett (even managing to bring the internet to our mountain hideaway). I photographed some nature with a new long lens for my camera; click here to see those pictures. I road a jet-ski for the first time. I spent some quality time playing with my nieces. And on returning home, I spent a lot of time doing nothing.

But that’s the problem with having that much free time when you get home. You run out of things to do. Right now I’m considering going to Lowes to buy an edger and a gas powered trimmer. Yuck! Chores! I can’t believe it’s come to that. Of course it might have been better if all of my friends weren’t out of town (separately) at the same time.

Oh well, I have just a little bit of time left and I intend to make the best of it. Maybe I’ll go see how much jet-skis cost.

Pictures are up from the Cubs/Cards game I went to at the new Busch Stadium. If you’ve ever wanted to see what a luxury suite looks like, click on over to the Cardinals set on my Flickr account. We won by the way. At least we took one game. :-/