Humpday Update – 5/14/14

Woo hoo! Humpday Updates separated by a food post! It’s almost as if this is a food blog..

• Biggest news this week? We booked a cruise! And not just any cruise… A cruise to Alaska! Land of the Midnight Sun! The final frontier! (wait, isn’t that space? Don’t quote me on “the final frontier” thing) North of the Wall! We are stoked. We’ve been wanting to go to Alaska for yeeeeeears and have never had an opportunity to go. We booked on Royal Caribbean’s Jewel of the Seas for June of 2015. A whole year away but hey, it’s official.

• My family and I have only been on 1 Royal Caribbean cruise while I was growing up. Other than that it was all Carnival and that’s what the wife and I have always known. But from when I went on them with my parents to the 2 the wife and I have been on, I feel Carnival has progressively gone way down in quality. Service, food, excitement – we knew we did not want another Carnival cruise. We did, however, really really really want a Disney Cruise. And that’s what we were hoping to do but in order to book it we had to give up one of our children. Since we want to enjoy the cruise with them we decided to go with the much cheaper Royal Caribbean. So maybe one day we’ll go Disney.

• Funny how we’re going to Alaska on a cruise line named Royal Caribbean. As far as cruises go, I don’t think it gets any more not-Caribbean than Alaska.

• I can’t really explain why we’ve always wanted to go to Alaska. Just one of those things we always wanted to do. I’ve been up and down the Caribbean so much that I’m surprised I’m not known on certain islands. And having been on only 2 cruises with different islands each, my wife realized how similar it all is down there. It’s beautiful and worth going just to take in that beauty. But the Caribbean these cruises take you to is aimed to please beach goers and drinkers. We’re neither. Ok, enough about the cruise. You have a whole year to hear me yap about it.

• Ok, ok. One more thing about the cruise… We’ll have to take it out of Seattle. Which is insanely awesome because I’ve always wanted to go to Seattle but the whole “other side of the country” thing always stopped me. I’m kinda equally excited about going around Seattle as I am about visiting Alaska. We’ll only spend a few days there so we’ll have to plan it good.

• I think my wife has a strange obsession with Holiday Inn Express. We’ve stayed there when we went to both Florida and New York the past few weeks, and she’s already looking for one we could stay in when we go to Seattle. I don’t know what it is, but I have a funny feeling it’s the free breakfast. More specifically, the pancake pooping machine.

• Speaking of Seattle, I finally beat InFAMOUS Second Son! Took me a while but it’s done and I was pretty happy with it. I thought I was going to be able to take the disc out but I still have strong urges to keep playing just to get trophies. I guess I’m not done with Seattle yet.

• I saw this freaking sweet conversion chart somewhere and I absolutely fell in love with it. I want to find a good way to frame it or something to hang it up in the kitchen.

• For Mother’s Day I got my wife some Disney designer bag by Vera Bradley. It’s her first designer bag since she’s not the type of woman to gawk over name brands (lucky me!). I thought she was going to send it back but I’m glad she didn’t. She deserves to have such things and enjoy them. Sucks though because I feel like the bag takes away from her the other thing I got her which I see as the superior gift:

• Speaking of my wife, we’re officially old people. We caught ourselves driving around our surrounding neighborhood comparing our grass to other yards. “Oh my God, look at that one, it’s so thick and lush.” I don’t think it gets any worse than that. And we wonder why we have no friends.

• Since I got my camera I’ve been acting as expected and pretending like I’m some sort of professional photographer. I’ve been beefing up my expertise by watching various photography videos on YouTube. It’s amazing, this age we live in, because if you really had a desire to learn something, there’s a really good chance you can learn it by watching YouTube videos.

• Speaking of the camera, I got a new lens. Usually I hold onto gift cards like they’re food and I’m stranded on an island. Seriously, I hate it because I act like I’ll never have another gift card for the rest of my life, it’s sad. Anyway, I blew a whole gift card on a lens. Which is weird because I usually wait for games or whatever I’m looking for to go on sale because if there’s anything I hate more than using gift cards, it’s buying something when it’s not on sale. But I decided to get a lens for my camera. It made me feel mature to the point where I felt old. But it also made me feel like I’m investing myself in my new hobby. Which by looking at the pictures I’m able to take with the new lens, I think I can get used to it.

• The lens, by the way, is Canon’s 50mm f/1.8 II. A prime lens that is the cheapest lens I’ve seen but can produce some amazing shots for the price. I fear the expectations everyone has of it breaking easy because of its build quality, but buying it was a risk worth taking. I can’t wait to use it more. I know the photos aren’t the greatest, but remember, I’m just starting.

• Did I really unbox a lens? Yes. Yes I did.

• Is it the first unboxing I’ve done of a lens? Yeeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhnooooo…

• NBC cancelled Revolution 🙁 I hate when shows I watch get cancelled. It’s happened to me a few times. While this one wasn’t as painful as another one that happened not too long ago (I won’t name it so I won’t put myself in a depressed funk thinking about it again), it still sucked big time. I really liked Revolution. The premise was pretty crazy and while it wasn’t the first show we chose to watch if we had a few recorded, it was addicting and you could marathon a few hours if you got into it. We’ve been behind and had like half the season on the DVR still. Which makes me even more sad because I feel like people like us are the reason why shows like this get cancelled. But as I was trying to justify deleting what we had left and not even bothering, it was still hard to do it. I mean, there’s no point in investing any more time into it. You’ll never get a payoff. You’ll never see how it all ends. So why bother wasting time watching it? Sensible thinking right? Nope, still took me like 10 minutes to press delete. And it hurt, but what can you do? R.I.P. Revolution.

• Also in that Revolution link, you’ll noticed they cancelled Believe as well. That was on the DVR to watch too but we never even got around to one episode. Guess that made it easier to delete all the episodes we had of it.

• Bunheads. That was the show. Don’t judge me. Probably my favorite show on tv when it was on and it was cancelled. That show was entertaining, funny, witty, interesting, it was everything I ever wanted in a drama about ballet dancing teens. And ABC Family just ripped it all away from me. Just thinking about it makes me sad all over again. I’ve tweeted them multiple times expressing my anger and I never got a response. If it wasn’t for Switched at Birth and Harry Potter Weekends I wouldn’t watch ABC Family anymore because they gave Bunheads the axe.

• What? You’ve never seen the farewell dance from the cast of Bunheads? And you’re dying to watch it because it’s the only closure you can get? Ok then, here it is. Let’s mourn together.

• Another show that got cancelled before it even finished its first season was Invasion. The wife and I were really into it. It was about aliens coming to Florida via hurricane and slowly started taking over peoples bodies until they had the whole town except for like one family. And its always that family, the one with the one parent and the crazy uncle. Anyway, we liked it and it was gone.

• Talking about cancelled shows, IsMyShowCancelled.com seems like a good place to keep an eye on if you’re worried about your faves. And thinking about it, the people at these channels that decide what shows go and stay are jerk faced assclowns. Shows like Pretty Little Liars are in their 5th year when shows like Bunheads are gone in a season. What kind of crap is that?! Was Bunheads too good for this world that we didn’t deserve its greatness? I say, as a show of good faith to the fans of all shows, any show that gets cancelled should be allowed to film a 2 hour finale that will end the series. I mean, it’s only fair. It only makes sense. Bring closure to the people who love what others have created. Dammit.

Alright, I’ll leave it at that. What an emotional roller coaster. First there was unmeasurable excitement for a cruise, now I’m all down thinking about Bunheads and how I’ll never see a new episode again. Thanks a lot, Humpday Update. Now I need a drink.

Do you have any favorite shows that “weren’t good enough”?