I woke up this morning to the sound of a car alarm going off. Got up, and looked at my computer and noted that it was 6:30 in the morning. It isn’t odd for me to wake up this early, I just hate it when I am ripped out of bed at the sound of sirens 10 feet from where I am sleeping (we don’t have any windows in our house so no sound is drowned out).

Usually when I get bored of playing Starcraft and the internet is not working, I will switch to my third favorite form of entertainment… Reading. But since I just finished Dan Browns The DaVinci Code and had nothing else to do, I decided to trek out to the beach and take some hot pics.

There wasn’t much going on. Couple people swimming ,this crazy old dude with no pants on, and an older man walking up and down the beach yelling “Medella, agua frio, Gatorade!”

I headed up the beach towards Los Ochas (a big surf spot near here) and caught these pelicans diving for food .

This one is exceptionally awesome, note the people about 5 feet away from where the pelican diving. They look scared,right?

This building is located near us was apparently burned out leaving only the facade to admire.

I wrote this post about start pages and the history of them (igoogle, live.com, netvibes, etc, etc). But decided that I sounded like I was getting paid by Netvibes or something. Of course I am not.

I just wanted to say that I think the new Netvibes is real slick. I advise you to check it out if you are into the whole start page scene.

It seems every time we go out I spot more and more really good street art here in Puerto Rico. I guess I will make it a never ending series. Here is the first blog I did about Street art in Puerto Rico.

These two faces are located directly in back of a bus stop. That explains all of the marker graffiti on top of them.

In Denver it was a drunken blur of green. The holiday doesn’t seem to mean much unless you drink or are in Elementary school.

They say it best in Boondock Saints “C’mon man, its Saint Patty’s day. Everyone is Irish.” Well not here in PR. I almost forgot it was even St Patrick’s day until I logged into Myspace a couple minutes ago. (Yeah, that’s sad). I went to the Wallgreens up the street yesterday and they had all of their Easter stuff out. The only green was in pastel. Talk about sad face. St Patty’s is one of my favorite holidays,  just above Xmas and right below Halloween.

I went into that very same Wallgreens at about 9 am on Valentines Day. The place was a mad house. Everyone in line was buying either teddy bears or chocolate.  They seem to observe all of the same holidays here (except for St. Patty’s). When we did first move here in January, we noticed many business didn’t take down their decorations until the beginning of February . I would have thrown a fit or two if that happened in Ut.

Anyways,  here is to Saint Patty’s Day (takes a sip of Paulo Veijo rum).

Since moving here I have noticed many of my friends and co workers asking me if you needed a visa to work here or a passport to come here. No and no, Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. (Sort or a state but not).

There was a truck  slowly driving down the street playing victorious Spanish music. I sat on the porch, smoked a cigarette and watched the truck go by. As I sat there pondering to myself what all that was about, two men came up to me wearing matching tee shirts. The one started speaking Spanish to me and I did not understand. The other one piped up “Hi, I am Louis. I am running for mayor of San Juan. Is there anything I can do to make San Juan a better place?” (Pauses and waits for me to say something.) Uh, do most people have an immediate answer to such a broad question? Hold on, give me about two hours to write down 100 items that you could make better.

I didn’t actually say that, it was what I was thinking. “I am not actually registered to vote” I said to the would-be-mayor. I thought to myself WOW, I don’t think I have ever met a would-be-mayor. He then began to tell me all about what he stood for, told me to register to vote, and shook my hand and left.

The main thing on his agenda was the fact that he was for Puerto Rican independence. That is a question I have been asking myself ever since I moved here. What the hell is a colonization? Could Puerto Rico survive without the US? I wanted to ask him more questions but he had more potential voters to meet.

I am not going to dive too deep into this subject because I really don’t feel like digging all over the web to find answers to this question. Nor do I know that much about the politics between the US and PR.

Side note-I can’t actually think of 100 things to fix here in Puerto Rico. Like I may have mentioned before, it is more like a developing country than a part of the United States. People here don’t seem to care about the environment (we have seen on many occasions people just throwing their trash on the ground) and you may want to read my other post on dead dogs .   Yes, there are many things he could fix but only because of my high standards for society from living in the states.

• An article about some of the history of FBI attacks on the independence of PR (a little biased, but interesting to say the least)
• Fight Back News
• Wikipedia article about the Puerto Rican Independence movement

I read this article a couple weeks ago and I cant stop thinking about it. What better way to show off your art than to buy things at a grocery store, strip everything off except for the bar code, and make your own label. It wasn’t really the article that got me thinking of this but the comments people left on the page see here.

Can putting your own art in the middle of a grocery store be really that bad? There are quite a few negative responses to this type of art. And I really can’t see anything wrong with it. What is the worst that could happen? Some one at the grocery store finds it and throws it away. If I saw something like this I would buy it right away. At the most 2 dollars and 50 cents for something like this you really can’t complain. Even from a non artistic viewpoint I can’t see what this is hurting. Just don’t buy the can if you don’t like it.

Neat. A picture of some wild turtles. Well, not wild, they were in our neighbors pond.