Aruba. Jamaica. Ooh. I want to take ya.

So Nicole and I got back from Aruba Saturday night. It's been a whirlwind since, and I have tons of things to talk about, but some of those will have to wait for a later post. So I'll start here with things I learned from my trip to Aruba.

1: Aruba is not technically in the Caribbean.
The Beach Boys' famous song "Kokomo" really makes you think that it's close to Jamaica and the Bahamas, and that Key Largo and Montego are very close. But they're not. Aruba is 18 miles off the northern coast of Venezuela, and is not in the "Hurricane Belt" which is good for the island. Almost all the "natives" we met were actually from Columbia, and nearly everyone spoke Spanish and English, so that was interesting. Felt like California, only everyone was a bit darker. There were also quite a few black people - remnants from the Slave Trade, I was told. You can check it out on this map if you'd like. I also learned that Bermuda is right due north off the coast of North Carolina. North Carolina. So in January, it's freezing. Weird, huh? Yeah.

2. Aruba, though not technically in the Caribbean has the bluest water I've ever seen
So what if it's not in the Hurricane Belt. This water was probably the nicest I've ever seen (beating Hawaii by a slim margin). The sand was this pure white, like talcum powder, and the visibility when we went snorkeling was like 60 feet. It was astounding. If you want to see what I'm talking about, you can check out this picture, which I took from our hotel balcony.

3. Aruba is a desert wasteland
It's dry, flat, barren and dry. There is no natural water source on the island and the only thing that grows there natively is Aloe plants, which - as Jeff Rev pointed out - is just a cactus. Convenient that a plant that helps with sunburn actually grows where you need it. Wouldn't do much good if Aloe grew only in Canada, or something. But Aruba is just ugly and dry and dusty. In fact, when Christopher Columbus found it, he named it "Isla Inunitil" which means "Useless Island" because there was no food, water or gold. The Dutch picked it up somewhere in there, and now it's part of the Dutch West Indies.

4. UB40 is huge in the Caribbean
We heard a song by them almost everywhere we went. Weird.

More to come...

Funniest home video...

My buddy Jonathan sent me this link as a reminder about why people have kids - mainly because they do things that are so irresistibly cute that it sends you into convulsions.

The following home video is an example. I laughed my butt off, not because the video is so professionally done but because of the idea of it all. It's simply hiliarious.

Click here to see it.

U2 in Concert...

If you called me last night on my cellphone and left me a message, I didn't get it. Not only was I indisposed, but it was only a few moments ago that i regained my hearing.

You see, last night I went to see Bono, Larry, Adam and The Edge (otherwise known as U2) at the Oakland Coliseum. For my birthday this year, my good buddy Jeff Rev bought me a ticket. We were directly behind the stage (which sounds weird, but the stage is circular), about 8 rows up. We were a little elevated, but not so much that you'd get vertigo or something. As far as I could tell, with the exception of some floor people, we had as good as seats as anyone. I could have thrown a water bottle with a flick of my wrist and had it land on the stage. Not that I would ever, ever consider doing that.

I will blog more extensively on this experience - and it was an experience - when I have more time. Also, I got home at about 1 a.m., and I am a teacher, and am used to going to be at 10. So I am quite tired now.

Let me end with this quick thought. Three times I thought I was going to explode. One, during the second song when they played Vertigo.. The crowd was so loud, you could literally feel the noise. Then, when Bono brought out a protable drum, and started pounding on it from the front stage as an intro into Sunday Bloody Sunday. I realized then that's probably my favorite song of theirs. The third moment was when they lit the whole crowd, and you could see the crowd of 16,000. And everyone was singing in unison, whether to "I Still Haven't Found" or "In the Name of Love" or "One" or whatever other song they were doing. That's a lot of people. Oh yeah, and on Miss Sarejevo, Bono sang the part written and performed originally by Luciano Pavarotti, proving that when he wants to be, he's as stellar a vocalist as is out there. He was quite outstanding. And let there be no doubt that The Edge is one of the finest guitarists imaginable. The things he...it's otherworldly.

So. In summary. Bono a stone's throw. The Edge drives you over it with his talent. Many, many lights.

Tieche's Favorite Stories: Number 21

Being a school teacher, I have a captive audience to test out my material on. Over the years, I've learned that there are a few stories that kids consistantly remember. "Hey Mr. Tieche," they'll say. "Tell us the story about the time you wound up in Nova Scotia with the rain slicker and the folk singer from Argentina." So I'm trying to compile them and hopefully will turn them into a booklet at some point. This is a story that I use to illustrate the importance of proper decision making to my out-going seniors. I hope you like it. - DAT

My freshman year of college was a time of tremendous change. You could sense it on that first day of school, as my classmates and I filed into the dorms. This college thing was a big deal. For the first time in our lives, there was no one telling us what to do, checking to make sure we did our homework, or threatening to not let us use the car that weekend if we didn’t clean up that pig-sty that you call a room.

There was a guy on my floor named Eric. Eric, like me, was experiencing for the first time an unparalleled amount of freedom. And Eric used that freedom – like many college students do – to cross formerly forbidden boundaries. Eric used his freedom to get drunk. And I don’t mean a little drunk. Oh no. Eric jumped into the alcohol pool with both feet. One morning, I trudged into the bathroom, wondering what in the world I was thinking scheduling myself a class at 8 a.m. As I opened the door, I saw Eric, lying across the line of sinks. Face down. His forehead was resting on the porcelain rim of the sink, and a dried yellow trail of vomit led down to the drain.

I tried to wake him up so I could brush my teeth, but he just smiled and rolled over.

That was just the beginning.

One night, Eric had been drinking heavily (again) and had to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. He went to the restroom to use the urinal. Well, at least he thought it was a urinal. It turned out to be Tim (his roommate’s) sock drawer. Luckily, Tim had purchased a brand of socks that was ultra-absorbent.

A week later, continuing his quest to perfect the drunken stupor, Eric was so inebriated that he fell off the top bunk in the middle of the night, and his head slammed into the back of a chair. The impact shattered his eye socket, leaving him with a nasty purple bruise over most of the left side of his face for several weeks. He looked like a cross between Rocky and Spuds MacKenzie.

You might think that breaking your face might lead one to reconsider one’s decision-making paradigm. Not with Eric. He drank more than a Hummer on the freeway. My sophomore year, we were in the same creative writing class and he wrote a short story about a guy who got drunk with his friends, took his dad’s boat out at night, fell overboard, nearly got run over and killed, and then deftly guided the boat up onto a nice rock for the night. While this is only conjecture, I’m guessing Eric didn’t have to reach too far back into his imagination for that story.

You might think that the novelty of imbibing massive amounts of beer might wear off after, oh, say the first two years. But not with Eric. He was committed to this lifestyle. His fraternity bedroom was wallpapered with flattened 24-pack boxes of Miller High Life. Tasteful.

Our junior year, Eric had been drinking so much, so he decided to go to bed. Having learned form his earlier incident, Eric now steered clear of top bunks. So he crawled into bed, a lower-level bunk. He slept next to the window, where he and his roommates had installed a window-unit air conditioner. Earlier that day, Eric and his roommates removed the unit, because it was now November. Eric, however, didn’t remember this important fact, while he was getting into bed. And he crawled right out of the window. He plunged, head first, two stories below right into the thick shrubs surrounding his fraternity.

The next morning, one of his housemates was walking their dog, and heard a soft groaning from the bushes. Eric had slept all night, wedged into the shrubs, with only the tops of his sneakers visible peeking up from the top of the bushes.

Again, you might think any activity that leads you to have a a near-fatal encounter with shrubbery might make the list of “Things I Need to Reconsider.” But not with Eric. He was astounding in his resilience. He was the Energizer Bunny of Inebriation.

I thought of this today when considering how I make decisions in life and how I want to live my life. Honestly, a large part of me wants to be the kind of person whose life doesn’t serve as a warning for others. If my life is going to be made into an anecdote, at least let the ending not involve me, head-first, in a hedge, vomiting Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Can I get an amen?

Hurricane Katrina

I am not being hyperbolic when I say this. I'm not sure what's worse. The devesatation brought about by Hurrican Katrina, or the inept handling of the disaster. It's unclear how many lives were uselessly lost because of horriffic leadership. These two clips are two of the most powerful I've seen in documenting both.

In this clip, FOX News' Shep Smith is speechless over the lack of response and leadership and Gerarldo Rivera shows his raw desperation to show the world the conditions in New Orleans.

In this clip, Ted Koppel interviews Michael Brown, the director of FEMA. You can tell that Brown strains Koppel's trademark - nay legendary - patience to the breaking point. At one point, after Brown says that Friday morning was the first day that FEMA knew about the conditions at the SuperDome, Koppel says. "Do you guys not watch TV? This is not the first day we've been reporting this." Click here to watch.

If you've seen pictures or read particularly moving stories about the hurricane, link to them here. I don't like reading those types of stories, but we need to.