Feckoff.net

We got a lot of lightning here over the summer, but its been quiet recently. Until tonight.

I went out to a local gun range yesterday with some friends from work, and got to play with a Barrett .50 calibre rifle. Holy crap. Those things are completely bat-shit insane. The sound and shockwave you get just standing in the vicinity of someone firing it is nuts. On top of that, we also had some fun with a suppressed Ingram MAC-11 9mm – you can empty a 30-round clip from that thing in about a second! – as well as some kind of pump-action shotgun (click-clack-BOOM!) and a Colt .45 semi automatic pistol.

I don’t want to sound like some kind of gun nut, but that was great fun.
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Well, I got back from Vegas on Monday night. Great weekend, but I am utterly shattered after it. You can check out some photos here.
Here’s a sample:

I didn’t lose too much money gambling either – mainly because I stayed at the cheap tables in places like Hooters rather than the expensive ones in my own hotel, the MGM Grand. Also, Vegas has a serious lack of free wifi – the only place I found any was at the airport. Hotels on the strip charge extra for it!
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*twitch*

I watched The Hangover in preparation “Some guys just can’t handle Vegas!”

Also, my direct, 2 hour flight to Vegas is costing more than a 3-hop day long trip all the way to Wisconsin for work next week! I suspect it will be considerably colder up there than in New Mexico and Vegas.

I’m still in America, and this weekend just past was their Labor Day holiday, which meant a 3-day weekend for me. I ended up going on a nice road trip with a few other Irish ex-pats here, it was fantastic. We went from Clovis to Ruidoso, where we stopped off for some food and watched a few horse races. After a couple of hours there we went on to the White Sands National Monument (and, er, missile range). This is the single most surreal place I have ever seen in my life. The white sand in question is not actually sand, but fine gypsum powder. It is unique to New Mexico. Here’s a photo:

And another for good measure:

We then spent the night in Las Cruces, New Mexico where some drinking was done. The following morning we continued south to El Paso, Texas, which is right on the Mexican border. From there we stopped by Fort Hancock, Texas – the place where Andy Dufresne sent his postcard back to prison before crossing the border after he escaped in The Shawshank Redemption. Despite not crossing the border, we got stopped by the US Border Patrol about 20 miles north of the border as we were heading back towards New Mexico. If we hadn’t got our passports with us that would have resulted in hours of waiting around while they verified that we are allowed to be in the country.

A few hours later we arrived in Carlsbad, New Mexico, but by then it was too late to go into the famous caverns. We did get to watch about half a million Mexican free-tailed bats exiting the cave for the evening though, which was pretty spectacular. We spent the night in Carlsbad and returned to the Caverns in the morning. It took a few hours to tour the caverns but was well worth it. The caverns are both a US national park and a UNESCO world heritage site.

Next stop was the Bottomless Lakes state park outside Roswell. Another beautiful spot, and the closest thing to the seaside you’ll find in landlocked New Mexico.

After that it was finally time to head home, after 3 days and approximately 850 miles. Good times! Lots more pictures on flickr.

Its still really hot here but I’m getting used to it. Its nice to not have to worry about getting pissed on every time you want to go and do something outdoors. Hot and sunny climate ftw. I’ve booked myself a flight to Las Vegas ($300 return from Lubbock) and accommodation in the MGM Grand ($250 for 3 nights, sharing a room and splitting the bill \o/) during September. Really looking forward to it. I’ve been working hard since I got here, some downtime will be nice. Also, I’ll be reclaiming that Irish bank holiday I got screwed out of by being over here in the form of Labor Day in early September

I’m was almost tempted to buy an Amazon Kindle, even though its wireless functions will be utterly useless outside of the US, until I discovered that they won’t even sell ebooks for it unless you’ve got a US billing address on your card. I’ll get some kind of ebook reader though, and this is due to the rapidly growing stockpile of books I’m building here. I’d like to bring them all home when the time comes but I don’t think I’ll have the room in my luggage. Ebooks would solve that problem. I tried using an ebook reader on my iPhone, but that sucks. I can’t read lots of text for long periods on that small screen, plus the battery life is not sufficient.

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I’m still baking to death in the New Mexico sun. Went to Roswell over the weekend, what a weird place. I discovered totally by accident that the Blackwater Draw is only down the road from me, as it was on the way to Roswell.
Also, I consumed far too much alcohol and spent most of Sunday nursing a hangover, which I am not used to at all. I think the altitude here in the high plains doesn’t help much there either!

p.s. Wordpress’s recently added automatic upgrade option is awesome.

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Stuff is so cheap here. I bought a HP laptop with a 15.6″ 720p screen, 3 gigs of RAM, decent dual core AMD CPU and a not entirely shit graphics chipset at good ol’ WalMart for $598. That’s €425 at current rates. I could have only got a weedy netbook with 1 gig of RAM for that back home. Or maybe some piece of crap with a celeron CPU.

It came with Windows Vista home premium but is eligble for a free upgrade to Windows 7 whenever the hell that’s released.

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Finally I’m here. American Airlines’ two hour delay out of Dublin didn’t help. I travelled via Chicago O’Hare airport. I was only ever in the international terminal (T5) there before and always thought it something of a dump with absolutely no food available once you go airside, and the only shops are a few poxy kiosks selling booze/smokes/cosmetics. I transferred to T3 today for my domestic flight to Dallas. Lo and behold, lots of shops and a proper food court airside! Why do they leave the international terminal in such a crappy state?

The transatlantic flight was on a pretty old Boeing 767 with an antique inflight entertainment system. The onward flight to Dallas was on a much nicer and more spacious Boeing 777. I also won the seat lottery on that one with an aisle seat in an emergency exit row with acres of legroom! The final leg to Lubbock was aboard a cramped Bombardier CRJ regional jet but the flight was mercifully only 45 minutes long

Now I sleep after being on the go for over 24 hours.

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I leave for deepest darkest New Mexico bright and early tomorrow morning. Work is sending me there for about 3 months. Got a visa and everything sorted out for me last month. That said, I only have a one-way flight ticket! Its going to take about 24 hours and 4 airports to get to my destination. There’ll be some jet lag into the mix on top of that (its 7 time zones away from home), with a net result of me being shattered for a week or so.

I am looking forward to the weather there (averaging 35 degrees celsius daily) after the last few weeks of miserable downpours and floods in Ireland. I hope to take a few photos and stuff to put up here when I’m over there. Roswell is apparently only about 100 miles away! Sadly, Vegas is a bit further away at 800 miles.

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