Rick Roll and how it changed my life

Okay, so a little over a year ago there was an internet phenomena called the Rick Roll. It was super awesome. For those who have never heard of this, the basic idea was that you tried to trick other people into seeing Rick Astley's music video of "Never gonna give you up." It involved people making fake url's that would redirect to the youtube video and all sorts of goodness. After it got going pretty big people would even post videos of them Rick Rolling their friends. One of my personal favorites is at a work place where they have obviously been Rick Rolling alot, they actually hire a singing telegram to give one of their coworkers a live Rick Roll. This continued to the point where the video, which was a lesser known song from the 80's had over a million hits on youtube.(As of the time of my writing it has over 2 million hits.) As things got bigger and bigger they even had Rick Astley himself Rick Roll the people of New York in the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade. And, of course, as with every internet phenomenon, it was also covered on one of my favorite comics: xkcd. So this all happened last year. Why am I writing about it now? Well, I recently discovered a mutation of this incredible internet meme. I don't know if this version of it will get around but you have to watch at least the first 30 seconds. It could change your life.
By the way, you just got Rick Rolled.

Ninth Moniversary - Tribute To An Old Friend

Well, Saturday was our ninth moniversary. It has been an exciting month, with our Hawaii trip and a visit from Robyn's parents. I asked Robyn what had happened this month that I hadn't written about yet. She said, "You left me home for a long long time." She was referring to all the work I did before our trip. So we pretty much decided that we didn't do anything at all this month before going to Hawaii. So it looks like this post will have to be all about what we did on Saturday. We had to say goodbye to an old friend, but we did get to say hello to a new one.

Those who know me well, also know my dear friend. He stays within a few hundred feet of me almost 24 hours a day. He has such nicknames as Chadwick and The Benz. This is what he looked like when he still lived with us.

We had been talking about selling him for a while, but then Barack Obama decided that the taxpayers should help me buy a car. I don't support that kind of legislation, but if he's gonna do it we're gonna take advantage of it. The only deal was that we had to trade in an old car that got bad gas mileage and had to buy a brand new car. So we started looking into new cars and decided we really liked the Hyundai Sonata. It's a pretty nice car and we were able to get a 10 year bumper to bumper warranty on it. So once we decided to do it, we had a goodbye party to say farewell to our old friend.

The next day after the party we drove home a newborn car. I'm sure this one will grow into our hearts as much as the previous one. It was an excellent moniversary gift!

I commented to Robyn that I didn't think I'd ever own a brand new car, yet it's sitting in my driveway right now!

Swimming With Sharks

Well, we've been home a few days now. We finally got our disposable camera film developed. Unfortunately, the pictures didn't turn out as well as I would like. But I got some okay ones that I can share. So now I can tell the story of swimming with sharks.

I scheduled it for our first morning in Hawaii. I had to be at the boat harbor at 6:30 AM. For those of you that know me you'll know that I'm not a morning person. But the good news is that 6:30 in Hawaii is 10:30 in Utah, and my body didn't know I was in Hawaii yet. So being up by 6:30 wasn't too big of a deal. I wanted to leave at 6 so I would have plenty of time to find the place I was looking for so I set the alarm for 5:45 which would give me 15 minutes to grab breakfast and what not. Well, it turns out I didn't need the alarm at all. 5:00 AM arrived and I was bright awake and ready to go. I turned off the alarm so it wouldn't wake Robyn and I made myself a good breakfast and played on the internet for a while until it was time to leave. I gave Robyn a kiss goodbye and hopped in the car.

I got to the boat harbor and freaked out just a little because they said to just meet at the boat harbor and didn't give any more specific information. After driving around a few minutes I saw big sign that said "Hawaii Shark Encounters" so I was able to simmer down and go get on the boat.

The boat holds 12 passengers. There was me, a family of 5(the mom showed up and paid and then got back in the car and let her husband and kids have the experience, she was like unto Robyn.) 3 couples and me. On the way out the 3 guys running the boat told us about the kinds of sharks we would see and gave us random facts about sharks. Once we got out there the shark cage was just floating in the water. We attached it to the boat so we could climb in and the first group started. The cage only holds 6-7 people so there were 2 shifts in the water. I chose to be in the second shift and watched the first group head out into the water. I was watching them swim around and then several times I saw sharks just below the surface. It was really crazy! I was planning on seeing them but it still surprised me the first time I saw one.

Well, that group was in the water for about 25 minutes, and then was going to be our turn for 25 minutes. During those 25 minutes the boat was bobbing up and down, up and down, up and down. I didn't know I was prone to sea sickness but apparently I am. After a little while my stomach started to feel really yucky. Suddenly without warning my breakfast went overboard. I threw up several times to make sure I got all of it. So, as you can imagine, the sharks were clearly not the traumatic part of the trip. The workers told me where to sit on the side of the boat where I would have the least motion. One of the other tourists had ginger snaps that they gave me. I guess ginger helps calm your stomach. I wanted to tell her I was fine now that my stomach was empty but I figured it wouldn't hurt to take some. I want everyone to know I wasn't the only person who threw up. Granted the other person was a 15 year old boy, and he didn't throw up as bad as me, but still, at least I wasn't the only one.

Anyway, after all that was over it was finally time for me to get in the water. They pulled the cage back to the boat and let us climb in. I was a little worried that I would not feel good in the water but I wasn't gonna let that ruin this once in a lifetime experience. Before getting in the water I took this picture of the island to show how far out into open ocean we were.

We got into the cage and they just gave us regular snorkel gear. I put my face underwater and very quickly started seeing sharks. I took a bunch of pictures but I guess there wasn't a lot of light underwater so most of them didn't turn out. Here are the best ones I got. Sorry they're not the greatest.



The middle one is obviously the best one. You can faintly see the sharks in the distance in the other two. Anyway, sorry this was a longer post. If you're ever in Oahu check out Hawaii Shark Encounters. It's a little over 100 bucks a person but it's a memory you'll never forget.

This had nothing to do with the shark encounter, but I thought it would also be fun to show you the turtle I swam next to the following day.