JeremyOswald.com

I spent the last weekend in Ventura working with Dan in an attempt to build an online coupon empire.  Friday I got to hold Ava, and I may even make her blog if I’m lucky.  As I was holding her, Dan and Marlene took approximately 80 photos in the span of 4 minutes, so now I know how they get all the great shots of their daughter, who is probably comforted by the camera flash by now and easily more documented than most celebrities or royals.  Combined.  I got to hold Ava for quite a while, and she didn’t cry once.  I did my interpretation of her “purse her lips and blow air fast in and out of her nose” thing that I read about on her blog.  She knows even at seven months that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  After explaining to Marlene what “STFU POS” means, she and Ava piled in her car and drove to San Pedro for the weekend, leaving Dan and I to fuck around unsupervised work.

First order of business was the Ventura County Fair.  Dan and I walked a few blocks from his house, where we boarded a school bus.  The bus was exactly as I remembered taking them growing up in Pennsylvania: big, yellow, green seats, windows that were difficult to open, and a driver with a mullet.  Since there were exactly seven of us on the bus, including the driver, Dan and I each took back to back seats and sat sideways with our backs toward the windows so we could talk.  This time the bus driver didn’t yell at me and make me turn around.  For a moment, I felt as if it were 1984 and I was in Hughesville, Pennsylvania, taking the bus home.  Except there was no Tommy with the crooked teeth from the trailer park on the outskirts of town telling me to ”69 my dog.”  I’d pay to go back in time and see my parents expression or hear their private conversations after I asked them what “69″ meant at the dinner table.

The Ventura County Fair is exactly like the Big Fresno Fair, except smaller and they serve fish tacos.  At the fair, I tried my first “Mexicone.”  A Mexicone is exactly what it sounds like, a cone made out of a tortilla, filled with taco ingredients.  Big props to Dan and his Treo for providing these pictures.

I’m thrilled with my mexicone

The mexicone is really not a good creation.  Being a cone, I just can’t see how it could ever be filled properly to ensure that ingredients are distributed evenly in each bite.  Ice cream in a cone is a lop of the same substance, with the ice cream to cone ratio growing closer by the bite.  A taco in a cone doesn’t work.  Meat, cheese, lettuce and whatever else may be included just can’t be distributed evenly.  Subsequently, whole bites of my mexicone included shell and lettuce, or shell and cheese.  You won’t hear me complain about shell and meat though, as it sort of gets to be similar to me and Josh’s yet-to-be mass produced invention, “taco bites” or “taco ends.”  Hot sauce was available, and while I knew the hot sauce wasn’t going to penetrate each layer of taco ingredients, I gave it a shot anyway.  For my efforts I had a couple of bites of hot sauce and shell.

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Here’s a Dan’s eye view of the mexicone.

We wandered around, had a corn dog, some beers and a funnel cake each.

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I saw a booth that advertised an “Oswaldo and Cynthia” keychain, but the picture looked nothing like me so I didn’t buy it.  Plus, my mexicone wasn’t cheap.  Dan bought a wallet identical to the wallet he had with him, that he had bought at a previous fair.  I was hoping the next wallet he bought would include a locator or On-Star or something, as many times as he loses it.  Ditto with his keys.  We caught the bus back to Dan’s house and worked for a bit.

A German, a Chinese guy, a South African and an American go sailing.  No really, we went sailing on Saturday morning.  Andre, Lance, Dan and I took Dan’s boat out on the Pacific.  It was a lot of fun, but sailing sure seems like a lot of work to me.  I asked Dan if part of the fun was the setup and preparation of the boat.  He said he likes figuring out all of the different aspects of sailing and the science behind it.  I think that’s what the other guys liked too, everyone except for me is a computer programmer or engineer or both.  We sailed for a bit, then took the boat to Brophy Bros. in the harbor for some seafood.  After lunch we headed back to Dan’s again and worked through the night and into the next morning.  During that time, we consumed a large pepperoni pizza each from a place called Tony’s, that serves pizzas to go in paper bags, sans box.  They only accept cash and don’t care what shape their pizzas take as they make them.  They were really good.

For breaks we’d watch episodes of “Flight of the Conchords,” which, as it turns out, is a pretty funny show.  To invent rap names such as “Rhymenocerous” and “Hiphopopotamos” is comedic brilliance.

I drove home today and watched the latest episode of “Top Chef” that gave me some great ideas for making mass quantities of food and then freezing it for later consumption.  In an unbelievable coincidence, just before watching the program, I ate some fried rice that I had frozen a couple of weeks ago.  Creepy, I know.