So, on Friday the 25th of last month I rode with Jeff, Brandon and Joy M. to Baton Rouge, Louisiana for the graduation party of my freind Sephen S., the same one I talked to about martial arts for an hour and a half in Puerto Rico.

I came back that same night, but left with my mother and younger sister the next morning for Houston, Texas. Some of you may recall the post from the LaQuinta. That was on the 27th, but it was so early in the morning that to me it was still Saturday the 26th.

The next morning, my mom and I went shopping for shoes. At the time, my shoes were about to die, and I needed new ones to take to Puerto Rico. I had a specific style in mind. Of all things to be really picky about, I am really picky about shoes. I like the design to be clean and simple with a touch of class to them. I eventually settled on the Adidas Samba series. I really wanted the Samba Millenium, but being unable to find it, I happily settled for the Samba Classic. I like it so much that I added to my wishlist a pair of the exact same shoe in white with black stripes.

Shockingly, I could not find this shoe in Houston. I found it back in Louisiana. We left Houston Sunday afternoon for Baton Rouge, again. We spent the night at the home of Paul C. We left there at about 11 the next morning and went to an outlet mall nearby. It was here that we finally found my shoes. We also found the Adidas SS 2G Slide, which I fell in love with instantly. We acquired these, and headed home.

During the drive home (about three hours long) we were in contact with some freinds in Memphis, Tennessee that were going to drive to Athens, Georgia the next day. James and John S. were going to be flying with me out of Atlanta, Georgia with my group of friends in Athens, but I needed to find a way to get there. Originally, my plan was to ride the train to Atlanta and stay a night with friends there. This plan had some problems, but I could ride the train to Memphis that day and ride to Athens with James and John the next. The only problem with this plan was that I was not packed at all for Puerto Rico, and I had no consideration at all for the possibility of staying gone an extra week.

Despite all odds, I was able to finish packing in two and a half hours, shower and be on the train by 5:45. I made it to Memphis at around 10 and then made it into Athens the next day at about 7.

I spent a day in Athens, mostly just watching the others pack and practicing Mario Kart. That was Tuesday the 29th.

Wedensday morning at 3 a.m. our whole crew got up and drove to Atlanta to meet the rest of our group. We all piled into a white 15-seater van with all our luggage and drove to the airport. We flew out just after 6 a.m. After a 20-minute layover in Philidelphia (and by layover I mean mad gate-to-gate dash) we flew to San Juan, Puerto Rico.

We were picked up, along with a group arriving at the same time by a group of three white 15-seater vans, which we piled into in identical formation to when we were riding to the ariport in Atlanta. We were driven to our assigned hospitality where we had dinner and slept. The next day we toured Old San Juan and relocated to the conference center in Toa Alto for the conference we were attending. That lasted two days, meaning I spent two nights there. This was the first time I spent two consecutive nights in the same place, not counting the time I spent in Athens, which involved one night of sleep and one night of pretending to want sleep that only lasted about two hours anyway.

The rest of the story is as you have read in previous posts.

I totally forgot about this, but on the day we got back from the conference, we had a day to hang out at with our hosts (we were staying in someone's home) and try to be Puerto Rican. They introduced us to a number of their favorite pastimes including the one shown it today's picture. I forget what the name of this game is, but it was something in Spanish about cat hunting. In Puerto Rio there are too many cats that were once domestic that became wild, so hunting them is encouraged by everyone, including the government. These cats are still somewhat familiar with people, so the trick in this game is to lure a cat out, gain it's trust and then kill it, preferably with a clean decapitation. Of the four visitors staying with me, I was the only one to actually score a kill. One other guy got close, but jumped the gun on and swung too soon. The cat got away, but he did nick it's tail.

In other news, I am shipping my Samsung back to the seller today. Hopefully I will get an RMA from the other seller so I can ship the Motorola back tomorrow.

Arrgh! I can't believe my horribly bad luck with cellphones! First, the phone I have under contract is falling apart. Then the phone I order off of ebay dies almost as soon as I start getting used to it. Now the phone that I just got does not work at all! And to finally top it off, I dropped a friend's cellphone into my glass of water while they looked at mine. It's just disgusting! I hope my latest seller can have a new phone shipped to me within a week. This is so frustrating. At least my friend's phone has a good prognosis.

The new phone is a Motorola v600. I guess I like it. The Samsung looks much cooler and is a little smaller, but that's all I have to judge on since the Motorola has yet to turn on for me.

For those of you who are interested in my trip to Puerto Rico, there is one post on the first page of older posts. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a link.

Ah, the States. It's good to be back in a land where people obey the laws of the road. Driving was really scary in Puerto Rico, and being on a well-paved interstate highway again was very comforting.

I will be staying in Atlanta for the night, and then relocating to Athens tomorrow, where I will stay for the remainder of the week. During this time I will be studying PHP, MySQL, MyPHP Admin and Linux stuff with all my techie friends in Athens. I will also be trying to catch up on all the sleep I missed while in Puerto Rico.

I am told that my phone should arrive in Athens on Monday, which is very good. I have a number of phone calls to make that I have not really been able to take care of with my phone being so defunct.

Today was relatively easy. We went to Ponce. The people of Ponce and Puerto Rico in general seem to have a lot of pride in the things that happened in Ponce. Apparently it was a big center for the baseball in Puerto Rico, seeing many famous baseball players including Roberto Clemente.

The first place we visited was a mansion built by a wealthy Spanish family that owned a sugar farm (I think) and a huge rum distillery. That was pretty cool. While I was there I got a small guitar key chain and two sample bottles of rum (today's picture). The one on the right is a citrus rum, and the other one has coffee in it. Neither one is very strong; only 80 and 60 proof respectively. That's really fine by me, though, since I've never tried rum before, and only got these out of curiosity. To be honest, I have no high expectations for these. I'm told that rum is a bit of an acquired taste, like most alcoholic beverages, and I have no interest in acquiring a taste for something like that. I just don't want to miss out on a potentially delectable treat. Those who know me know that I will try anything at least once.

After the tour of the mansion, I went to a nearby Japanese-style garden. It was much smaller than I had hoped, and in really lacked the character of a real Japanese botanical garden. It was nice, though, and the shade there was very relaxing.

My group also visited a watchtower in the shape of a giant cross. The view was really nice, but overall it left no real impression on me; a very emphatic 'Meh!'

Next we had lunch at a local fast food chain called The Taco Maker. Awesome creativity there. 10 points to Gryffindor. The food was very good and I enjoyed a very filling meal for just under $5. Really not bad. I wish they had locations nearer to my regular hangouts.

We went on a tour of downtown Ponce by trolley with a couple of stops on the way. We deboarded the trolley for a closer look at a sports museum (really more of a baseball museum, but there was at least one boxer featured there) and a graveyard. The graveyard was cooler, since most of the graves were destroyed. There were exposed human remains (no skulls that I saw) and tombs that opened into a small cave about four feet deep and were filled with about a foot of water. Just looking in made you feel like Indiana Jones.

I really didn't pay much attention to the tour. I spent most of the time discussing martial arts with my friend Stephen S. from Louisiana. He has never formally studied it, but has been interested in it for a long time. Despite his lack of real contact with combat training, he has a very savvy approach to the many fakes out there. All those "Destroy your opponents with this proven method!" books were recognized as being the unpractical nonsense they are. We had a lively conversation lasting about an hour and a half, which was basically the entire tour. We even had a quick sparring session in the back corner of the graveyard, though we never actually sparred for real. Mostly I just demonstrated Jeet Kune Do philosophy in action.

We spent about an hour walking around the central plaza in Ponce looking for good souvenirs, but I saw nothing worth buying there. I hope to grab some coffee tomorrow, but I think I ran out of time for that. We shall see how that goes.

An update on my cellphone: the person who sold me the Samsung phone has agreed to refund me my money if I ship him the phone. I won't really miss it, but I did really like it. It's a pity it fell apart. I will ship it to him on Monday once I arrive in Georgia.

I will be staying at the home of Phil and Kasia B. in Georgia for a week, and then ride back with them to my home in Mississippi on the 17th. Hopefully my new phone (which should have arrived at my home today) will be shipped to Georgia to join me there by Tuesday.

Finally, to all you who have been sending me emails to say how wonderful my blog is: please feel free to leave a comment by clicking on the "X comments" button beneath my post.

So today we went snorkling. Wow. Before coming to Puerto Rico, I had never been snorkling. I went on Monday at the beach for about 30 minutes after about an hour of swimming around the reef without any gear. Even there, where the reef must have seen many unwelcome visitors, the water was full of fish and urchins. There were tons of urchins everywhere. Several people were stung by them, and a few of those were poisonous. It was nothing serious, but the sting left a small piece of the spike in the skin and if it were poisonous, it caused a small area around the prick to turn purple. I was not stung, but that was mostly because I was not adventurous enough to try any of the things that got the others stung, namely swiming into caves in the coral, walking around in the tide pools without watching the ground and (seriously) attempting to grab a spike from the urchins body.

At the edge of the reef where the open ocean began, there was a drop off of about 35-40 feet straight down. It was really scary to look out there and see nothing in front, on either side or even below.

That was Monday. Today we went on a catamaran and sailed out to a shallow reef off the shore of one of the smaller islands that are considered part of Puerto Rico. Here I was able to really get good at snorkling. We were given a mask, snorkle and flippers by the boat crew and were set loose on the reef.

I am an asthmatic, which has not really bothered me in a long time, but because of this I took a long time to get used to breathing through a tube. Because I am an asthmatic, I need more air in my lungs than most people, or at least I feel like I do. When we first went out, I got tired very quickly. I had to stop every few feet and take off my mask to catch my breath. Eventually I got used to using the flippers and found that if I moved my feet a little bit, I could float on the surface with my face in the water allowing me to breath almost normally and still see underwater. Once I mastered this, I was able to dive very deep to see all the coral up close, and then rest and catch my breath on the surface with my face still in the water.

At this reef we saw several colorful parrot fish, as well as a number of these electric blue fish. The lucky ones among us saw a school of these with about 20 fish. I followed it for a few minutes, and got very close. The closest I got to them was about three feet away. We stayed at this location for a little less than 2 hours, and then we boarded the catamaran to travel to another, deeper reef.

After we got out of the water, we had lunch as provided by the boat's crew. We had sandwiches and a cold macaroni pasta, which we washed down with the most wonderful pina coladas.

Once we got to the new location, we were actually within a short swim of the Atlantic Ocean. We were required to stay in the Carribean Sea, but we were that close!

Here we were given bread and told to feed it to the fish. We took fistfuls of bread and dove into the water. We could swim up to a fish and actually hand feed them! This was with the risk of getting bitten on the fingers, but no fish there was capable of doing any damage to your hand. As I swam around the reef, I would peer into the deep cracks in the coral to see what was there. I often saw an urchin lurking in the dark. Some had spines as much as eight inches long, meaning the whole thing took up a sphere 20 inches in diameter! Needles to say, I did not attempt to go any further into these holes.

As I made my way back around to the boat, I saw that the area where we were feeding the fish was full of fish of all colors of the rainbow. A quick search on Wikipedia told me that one of these species was the yellowtail snapper. There were also damselfish, which were really cool looking, but very shy. There were a bunch of others, including a number of parrot fish, some cool fish with red heads fading into a white body with red-orange speckles, and so many others I can't remember them all.

We finally left for shore at 2:30, and made it back to our hospitality by five-ish. I took a nap and went to a meeting with the Church in Humacao. There was a meal, singing and a time of sharing. After that we returned and packed it in for the night. Tomorrow will be a long day of shopping.

Also, my father sent me two text messages. Evidently he forgot that the main screen on my phone is defunct. I cannot read text messages.

Wow, it's been a long two days. Yesterday I was so tired when I got back that I fell asleep on my bed on top of the clean laundry I had put on my bed that morning.

Yesterday began with a trip to the rainforrest. We (about a third of the group) went on a quick hike downhill to a waterfall where the rest of the time was spent swimming and sitting under the waterfall. I also jumped off a short cliff over another, smaller waterfall. The drop was about 25 to 30 feet. Someone got a picture of me as I went over, but I haven't managed to get it from them yet.

After we left the waterfall, we went back up to meet the two-thirds of our group that went to the top of a mountain instead of down to the waterfall. When we got to the rendezvous, the other group was not there. Apparently they saw a sign (a napkin saying 'Saints, go this way') and went down the wrong trail - a three-mile dead end. When they finally made it back to where we were, we left to go to our other outing: kayaking on a bioluminescent bay.

The kayaking trip started poorly for me and my 'shipmate,' since we were both very new to kayaking. I was the more experienced of the two, with one canoe trip under my belt. We zig-zagged through the channel into the bay, hitting the sides numerous times. In my defense, by the time we left on our kayak, the channel we had to travel down was totally pitch black. We finally made it to the bay at the very end of our group of kayaks and formed a small island in the middle of the bay by grouping our kayaks and holding onto our neighbors boat.

Our tour guide gave a long and thorough description of the bioluminescence and what caused it, along with a description of the efforts to reproduce the effects. The lights are from a species of plankton that thrives in that unique environment. The guide said a lot more, but I forgot most of it immediately. During the talk, a fish jumped into my boat. I found it flopping around next to my foot. After playing with it for a few minutes I put it back in the water.

The water itself was completely black, with nothing visible anywhere... at first. When anything caused a current in the water, the plankton lit up with a gentle blue-green sparkle. It was far too faint for any camera to capture, but to our eyes it looked amazing. You would get the best results by sticking your hand in the water and shaking it around under the surface. This caused a bright glow all around your hand as if it were conducting lightning.

On the way back, my boat was able to move much faster. We still had a few problems, but we weren't the last to make it through the dark channel. The coolest part was when the channel got really dark, the wake of the boat glowed with thin lines of kryptonite-colored plankton.

Today we went to a cave. It was absolutely incredible. All the cave formations that had taken millions of years to build were right within my grasp. Of course, I didn't touch them for fear of destroying them, which is possible, even if it is a really huge formation. They are all really delicate. Really all I can say about the cave is that it is just amazing. I hope to get a really good camera and go back soon.

Also, the picture here is the last one I took before my phone's screen died. It is of El Morro, one of the Spanish forts on the Puerto Rico Bay.

Ah, ha! Very tricky, Blogspot! You see that I'm in Puerto Rico, and display all commands in Spanish! Little do you realize that I am very inconvenienced by this!

So once I got to Puerto Rico, the first thing I did was get some coffee. Well actually before that I arrived at my hospitality in Humacao and spent one night there. But, once I got up and started touring San Juan, there was a coffee shop right there that made an amazing frappé. They also made the really awesome latté on the right. As you can see, the name of the shop is the Cafe Cola'o.

Touring Old San Juan was very interesting. There are lots of Spanish defensive walls and forts to protect San Juan Bay. We went to one fort, I forget the name, and that was very cool. I'll post a bunch of pics later, but right now I have a bunch to say.

I attended the conference in Toa Alto, Puerto Rico, and enjoyed it immensely. I missed the internet terribly while I was there, and was happy to be reunited with it when I returned to my hospitality.

My phone, the one I just got, is having serious problems. The main screen does not stay on for more than a few minutes, and it makes no sounds when ringing. Also, the vibrator is almost non-existent, and apparently it was dunked under water. I have filed with PayPal to get my money back, and hopefully the process will go quickly.

Because I depend on my phone so much, I already ordered another one. With any luck, it will be waiting for me on my return.

If there is anything I missed, or you want to hear about something specific, please post a comment, and I should have another post tomorrow.