Florida Bound
It's time for another hurricane relief work trip to Florida. Me and six other friends and family members are headed down to South Florida to work on homes damaged in 2005 by Hurricane Wilma. Yup, people are still recovering!

Will post photos and a trip report when I return.

In the meantime, please enjoy this odd video from YouTube.

Cue the Twilight Zone music

I'm back from Florida. And that's odd. I left late Thursday during some stormy weather and experience the most turbulent flight I've ever been on before. The Southwest crew even warned us about it before we were on the plane, saying it was going to be "quite a bumpy ride."

Seriously, I'm glad I don't get motion sickness. Then Friday morning I turned on the TV to see the news about the horrific tornadoes that tore through the area where I'd just been covering a tornado that hit on Christmas Day. It gave me an eerie feeling, knowing I'd just been in some places that were now piles of rubble and stayed in a hotel that was very close to the path of the storms. Freaky.

I'm sure I'll be headed back down there again soon.

In the meantime, I'll share the photos from my 20 minutes on Daytona Beach that I took in between meetings. It was a nice break.

The weekend was nice. Amy and I held a rad Groundhog Day party, I taught an improv workshop on Saturday afternoon, then watched "The Devil Wears Prada" on Saturday night. It's a pretty good movie and I recommend it.

Sunday was spent napping until watching the Super Bowl. I didn't have much of an allegiance to either team, but I ended sealing the Bears' fate by choosing to cheer for them since the Colts had beaten the Bengals earlier this season.

Anyone else agree that this year's commercials were less than impressive? I think I laughed at only two or three of them, and my favorite was a promo by CBS where David Letterman and Oprah Winfrey were snuggling on a couch watching the big game.

Prince's half-time show was awesome. I enjoyed it much more than any of those half-time shows where they trot out 37 various singers who have nothing in common and then warble out bad versions of each one's songs. Rock on, Prince.

Beyond that, this week should be good. Headed to North Carolina on Thursday for an improv festival - woo!

Otherwise I'm boring.

Florida

I'm in sunny Florida right now for work. I'd post a picture of the Daytona Beach beach I was allowed to drive onto yesterday, but this new version of blogger is giving me a hard time. Stupid crap.

Anyway, you can drive on the beach here, which just seems wrong to me.

Also, other interesting things: I was right by the Daytona International Speedway, and even though I'm not a big NASCAR fan, it was still pretty cool. The place is huge and yesterday they were doing Indy car testing. While I could not see the cars, I could hear them all across town - and if you're never heard an Indy car before, holy crap! What a sound! I loved it and even parked near the Speedway for a bit to do some work (hooray for mooching off someone's unsecured wireless) and hear some big engines revving.

And then, THEN, as I drove off, something even cooler happened. I was stopped at a traffic light and was the first up against the "STOP HERE" line. In the oncoming lanes on the other side of the intersection I noticed this Chevy SUV parked perpendicular to the lanes and blocking someone off. Then I saw flashing lights and thought, Oh, it's just an accident or something and the cops are here.

But then one of the cops jumped out of her car and ran up to the car the Chevy was blocking off. She tried to open the door handles but it was locked. So she grabbed her baton and started smashing the windows and the driver tried to ram his way between her car and the Chevy. It was straight out of World's Wildest Police Videos. The guy couldn't get through, but he sure did smash up the cars. Then the light turned green and I drove off, not wanting to get caught up in whatever they were doing over there. It was awesome.

So yeah, Florida. Never a dull moment.