new bethel baptist
Now who thinks this stuff up?
Archive for August, 2005
Virginiee
So we made it to Virginiee. The plane ride was a pretty easy affair, straight from the PVR to Newark, non-stop. I can’t complain. My sister picked us up from the airport and we high-tailed it down to Newport News, VA. in 6.5 hours. That’s gotta be a record. I’d say mostly due to light traffic, cuz I like going 90 mph. but in this section of the country, cops grow on trees. and trees is everywhere. so that’s definitely a no-no. We rolled in to VA at 4:30am and crashed hard, woke up this morning and went with the fam and my aunt and cousin to Waffle House, where a waffle with fruit really means a waffle loaded with whipped cream and this sugary, syrupy, gelatinous substance that feigns to have real blueberries slopped on top. are we in the south or what?
This is really Marcia’s first trip inside the US, to a place other then a major city. She has visited NYC, LA and SF. Rural Virginia is nothing like those three places and she’s getting a kick out of how different and alien things are out here in the sticks. This trip should be a lot of fun.
Year One.
August 23rd marks a full year that I’ve been down here in Vallarta. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about this blog and what it accomplishes, the parts of my life that i choose to leave out for one reason or another, looking back on a full year of living outside of the United States, completely changing careers, meeting and falling in love with an amazing girl, etc…
It’s been a long strange trip. an extremely fun one but also very stressful and testing along the way. The first 4 months or so were almost a perpetual vacation, as I adjusted to the tropical lifestyle of an ex-pat living in Mexico. New experiences were happening every few seconds, this country was new and foreign and it still is to a certain extent. February marked a left-turn towards work as the vacation ended and I learned to balance the work with the play. And now as we move into September and work continues to dominate my daily experience, I’ve been thinking about putting more of my work thoughts into this blog thing. Not necessarily the daily grind or the office drama, but more the kind of things I’m learning as I continue to forge a new career for myself, graphic/web designer turned house developer/designer. The idea is to open this new focus of mine up to a two-way forum like this one, I have so many questions and things to share. Going forward, I don’t think this site will change much, maybe a few nips and tucks here and there and a new header graphic when i get some free time, but mostly I just hope to start talking about some of the things, that up to this point, I’ve kinda felt were off-limits. Not necessarily off-limits but more breaking down the myth that I’ve consciously or unconsciously portrayed that I’ve been on a year long vacation/adventure. This isn’t to say that the experiences that i’ve written here are any less authentic, but more like when at the six month mark I started to balance out the play and work lives, I hope to do the same thing here to create a clearer picture of my daily life.
So that’s about it. Here’s to one miraculous, wonderful, insane year. Thank you, Mexico. I also wanna send a big, special hug to my girl, Marcia, September 1st is our nine month anniversary and I can’t even imagine my life without her.
Flying Spaghetti Monster
Geez, I leave for a coupla days, with no internets and something this brilliant passes me by: Open Letter To The Kansas School Board. The origin of “Flying Spaghetti Monster” and learning to love “intelligent design”. Mexico may be crazy, but the U.S. is insane.
First surfing pic
This is the first and only really decent pic I got to take with my new Pentax Optio WP. I have two other pictures that turned out, but one is so blurred that it’s not worth showing it. This camera is great, but it needs a lot of light and the only two times I gotten to take it out, it was raining and the clouds were black. The camera also needs to be set on the ‘action’ setting which gives it a faster shutter speed but at the expense of megapixels.
I’m learning how to hold the camera, jockey my board into position, dodge the incoming wave and take the shot of the surfer dropping down the face. This is proving to be quite difficult, never mind actually taking pictures of myself standing up on a wave, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon. although i did have dreams. I’m torn between wanting to take photos and wanting to grab any wave i can. The next time I go out, i’ll bring fins and swim out to the line-up. All the kids out there, laugh at me and my submersible camera, most of ‘em can’t believe it. The Pentax rocks.
GDL > PVR > NYC
Marcia and I have been in guadalajara for the past 4 days. We went up to the GDL to go to a construction expo called Contru05. We went to find sources for sinks, air-conditioners, appliances, flooring, handcrafts, furniture, pool equipment, parking garage gates, and basically anything having to do with putting together a medium sized housing development. I was also on the look out for smart pre-fabrication companies, people that were doing something different then your average office on wheels. I am very interested in modern pre-fab houses in mexico. The expo was a total bust! The website said there were over 2000 exhibitors. I think more like 200. and they were organized mainly into 2 groups: heavy machinery - like the machines they use to build dams and the second group was for like housing development companies (like us) who were trying to sell their houses to people at the convention. but it was a bit of a joke, because I’d say 90% of the visitors were students from the engineering school nearby. oh well.
So we got back today and I checked my vonage voice messages, to hear from my sister that my grandfather, Mr. Edmund B. Fladung Jr (my namesake) had passed away yesterday. He knew his time was coming and he had said as much in a letter to my cousin wendy. He was on old guy and had been through many surgeries to correct the tolls that age leaves on a man. He was ready to go and got to go out to dinner the night before, so he went out in style. No long drawn out hospital battle. No nurses. just family nearby. and a peaceful sleep. He was good man. we never agreed on politics, but that never stopped us from loving each other. I was a lazy grandson, never cashing his birthday and xmas checks, not out of some lack of appreciation but rather just a nasty habit of habitually losing said checks. This caused him a little grief towards me and he let me know in no uncertain terms, every year at tax time, when Uncle Mike would do his taxes and Mike would notice that two checks from the past year had not be cashed in grand dad’s bank account. and veritably the paper trail would lead back to me.
anyways…
Marcia and I are going back to the east coast, tomorrow, for the funeral on tuesday. We’ve decided that instead of just me going back for a few days and wasting all that money, that it would be nice for both of us to go back and stay a week or so. Marcia will most likely be meeting my dad’s entire family in Virginia (the funeral) and a good portion of my mom’s when we go back up to NYC for Labor Day weekend. It might be a wee bit too much for her, but I know they’ll all adore Marcia. It’s hard not to. she’s such a beautiful woman, inside and out. We don’t have any solid plans yet, but we’ve been brewing a plan with my sister, Beth, to take a side trip to Ocean City, Maryland, where my grandparents lived. My aunt is giving away all the things in their house, and we thought it might be nice to spend a few days in OC, see the old house and hit the beach and boardwalk. sounds like fun to me.
COLOURlovers
COLOURlovers. another resource for getting your color on. I love dem colors.
Noritz
I know I’m getting old, when I have gadget lust for tankless water heaters. I have Dwell to blame for this one.
Today was a good day
Well, it ain’t 12 foot waves er anything, but I went out surfing today at Veneros and we had some solid 6 footers, I’d even say an occasional 8 footer.
Veneros is a very steep, fast and short beach break. The set waves coming in, fall into 3 categories: waves that look like they are gonna stand up and kiss you but end up mushing out, nice peak waves with a great take-off shoulder that give a nice rollarcoaster ride and then there’s the total close-out waves that rise up instantaneously, and then break all at once, devouring anything in it’s path. The trick is to know which wave to take off on and to battle the 30 or so other dudes that are smart enough to know also.
Everyone and their kid brother was out today. Apparently there’s a hurricane a few hundred miles west of here, kicking up some decent swell, a little stormy for my tastes, but I ain’t drunk from the well in a long time, so I was parched. Veneros is a trusty break and sure enough today she was going off. I didn’t check the other spots, but I assume that Veneros was the only one breaking because all the usual suspects were out today. After about an hour or so half of the Sayulita locals contingent showed up and we had longboarders surfing at Veneros, something I have yet to see, until now.
I got in a few waves here and there, enough to make it all worth while. My signature ride for the day was a nice rollercoaster affair with a big, fat carve, that I ended by crouching low and dunking myself into the mini-tube as the wave started to close out. nice! The rain showed up just as we got there and poured for the better part of 3 hours. The sun peaked it’s head out between the thunderheads and gave us all a spectacular goodbye sunset.
I was so juiced, I grabbed Indalecio’s fins and went back out for a 10 minute bodysurfing session on the smaller waves, no one was bothering to catch. the end to a perfect day. tomorrow promises to be a bit bigger, but i’m not holding my breath. The swell has been so inconsistent recently, that it could flatter then a pancake.
Today was a good day.
adopt design
adopt design. I’ve loved this guy’s work for years. I was just link diving in my bookmarks and came across his link again. In my dreams, I make photography sites that look like Rune’s. wow!
CSS Layout Techniques
particletree · An Overview of Current CSS Layout Techniques. a great primer and resource for getting started with Cascading Style Sheets.
the 5 sec. movie review
The Final Cut
eh, coulda missed this one. although having a large video editing system made out of wood was pretty interesting. the scifi-noir mix was nice but the plot was a bit weak. It kinda reminded me of Gattaca, a good thing. Tak Fujimoto on the lens, cinematography was great.
Slam
great film. Saul Williams is a genius. the incarceration statistics, alone, make this worth downloading, er, um, renting. Beautifully shot but gritty and unrefined. Like watching the dancing soul of a Jonathan Kozol book.
We Don’t Live Here Anymore
A better version of Closer without all the apathetic characters. Rufalo was great and Naomi Watts is usually great, but i wasn’t feeling her so much. A welcomed breather from the typical summer action flicks, but I coulda rented this one. 5 minutes into it, Marcia realized she had seen it a year and a half ago, in Canada. I asked her if she wanted to go see Bewitched instead, she declined. good choice.
Stealth
Don’t ask. we were bored and we both have a new popcorn fetish. Josh Lucas makes a good action hero, Jessica Biel doesn’t, but damn does she look good (what?! i’m just sayin’…). Why does the guy who won the best oscar last year have to play the buddy wingman who gets killed off 1/2 through the film?
The Island
I love scifi pics. this one had a bit too much predictable action in it, but overall I kinda liked it. There was a plot hole here or there, but all the techie stuff was just great. why did this movie bomb in the US? gotta love Scarlet Johansson, not exactly a good action chick but man is she cute.
Ain Redo
Gregory Ain Model Home Redo & Add On. A blog documenting the construction process of one of the Ain model homes in Mar Vista. great idea!
running out of gas
This a photo of Arturo pouring gasoline the old fashioned. While up in Punta Mita on Saturday, mom’s truck ran out of juice, being the large, fossil fuel-guzzling behemoth piece of junk that it is. With no gas stations for a 20 min. drive, luckily enough you can buy gas by the liter from one of the corner stores. a relief to be sure. 1 gatorade (red), 10 liters of gas, 1 plastic jug and 1 funnel later, we were ready to go.
gritty mexico. i love this place.
phantom swell
ok, so the large swell that we were supposed to get this week was a total ‘phantom swell’. I went surfing three days in a row, and each day, I was waddling around in blown out baby waves. It was like trying to surf on Lake Michigan. Burros wasn’t breaking at all, so we went up to Sayulita and I have never seen Sayulita so flat. It was breaking in Veneros, but for a break that small, there were like 30 to 40 guys out. whoa, that’s called an exercise in futility.
I just checked the surf report again, and it says we’re “supposed” to get 14 foot waves on the 23rd. Now either a hurricane is on the way or we are gonna get a decent 4 foot swell. Either way, I’ll cross my fingers, do a little dance.
again, wish me luck.
Who Da Man?
Seriously? Who. Is. The. Man?
Me, das who. In these pictures you will find one well-worn Pemex shirt. Pemex is the Mexican national gas company and this shirt is the uniform. They are not for sale and you never see people on the street wearing Pemex shirts.
So what does this gringo do? I find a gas station attendant who will sell me the one off her back. And a new fashion trend is born. I should find a way to get these suckers whole-sale and sell them to Urban Outfitters, I’d be a gazillionaire, overnight.
hmmmm….
waves are imminent
I went surfing for the first time in easily a month, today. It was awesome. Everything hurts. I ache all over. I got rolled several times. I loved every second of it. My surfboard, she thought I had abandoned her. I gave her a sweet hug and said, this ain’t nuttin’, there gwon be 11 foot waves on thursday. we got some trainin’ to do!
It’s gonna be brutal. i cant wait.
rss reading
i just tried newsgator and i gotta say, it looks good, but it’s slooow. I’ll take the crappy looking, fast-loading, highly customizable bloglines any day of the week.
Six Portraits.
Don Rigo
Rigo is our nightwatchmen for the Punta de Mita house. We had put the house on hold for a few months and Rigo had gone back to his little ranchito, somewhere in the hills above Vallarta.
Now that we are back in business, Don Rigo is back and very happy to be useful. He guards the house like a pro and when ever I come up to the house he always has something to say, most of the time I can’t really understand him, but I always listen.
The “Don” in “Don Rigo” is a title of respect and Don Rigo is a weathered old guy who has mine.
Mary Fladung
Mom gets skiddish every time a camera is pointed her way, with 3 photographers in the family, it’s understandable. She’s a beautiful woman and this image was taken in the “abuelos” (grandparents) bedroom, of a house which she single-handedly designed. Pretty good for an Wharton MBA grad. is there anything this lady can’t do?
Arturo
Arturo is one of the “albañiles” (workers) working on the house in Punta de Mita. He is assisting Camerino and fastly learning the craft. He’s a humble guy with a positive vibe at all times. I hope that Arturo stays with the crew for a long time, he’s definitely ‘Quality Peoples’.
Camerino Vasquez
The man. (period).
In this photos Camerino is talking about some bunk beds he is constructing. Made out of concrete slabs attached to the walls and stripped-bark wood posts, the calculations need to be perfect. Nothing is perfect in Mexico, but Camerino is explaining to how his calculations are indeed perfect. The bunk beds will be amazing. He took a concept that Mary had and improved on it, x10.
Camerino is a master at old school mexican building techniques.
Marcia Vara
Marcia is walking through the Punta de Mita house for the first time. Mary is describing to her the various finishings and design concepts we are about to create in the half-finished house. Marcia is the smartest person I know. Literally. She’s so on the ball, it’s scary. I feel the need to watch myself sometimes, so that I don’t start slipping and become lazy around here.
Marcia is helping Mary and I buy a lot of the finishing materials. in addition to keeping the accounting.
Isn’t she lovely…
Felipe and Mercedes
Felipe is out nightwatchmen at a piece of land her in Bucerias. He watches over it, until we are ready to start construction. His wife, Mercedes, stays with him.
On Saturday, I stopped by to pay Felipe. Mercedes was cooking ‘Pozole’, a stew-like dish made from either pork or chicken, with large kernel corn and spiced with lime, onions and serrano chiles.
Mercedes invited me for a bowl of Pozole and although I had sworn off home cooked pork, after the last time I had pork (i was sick for days), I had to oblige, it’s the mexican way.
Felipe and Mercedes were very happy to have Marcia and I at their table. and it was great sharing this with them. I had met Mercedes a few times before, but it was great to spend a little time with her. They were especially pleased that it was my birthday and that they could feed me on such an auspicious occasion. On the way out I gave Mercedes a nice big, slightly awkward hug (she’s a bit short) and she turned to me and said that I was too tall to hug and smiled at me, I can see why Felipe loves her so much.
My New Toy!
Marcia went through a herculean effort to get me a Pentax Optio WP, for my birthday. It’s no easy feat getting one of these cameras delivered to a small mexican town, on time and without paying stiff importation taxes. Her efforts utilized the full extent of the “gringo network”, down here, to get the camera here on time. She is a goddess for sure.
This camera is waterproof up to 5 feet and if you don’t know me or my blog, I’ll fill you in on the big kicker: this camera is perfect for taking pictures in the water, surfing. The waves are on the way and hopefully, so are the pictures. These pictures were not taken with a camera housing. The camera is no bigger then an ipod and fits perfectly in my boardshorts pocket (best to have two pockets: one for the camera and one for the surf wax.
Here’s out first day with the new camera, in the pool. It takes wonderful pictures in and out of water. The lens is clear and clean, the colors are pretty right on, and those 5 megapixels do wonders for image clarity.
I wanna thank my baby, this opens up a whole new facet of photography for me. A person and a blog dedicated to surfing with no actual pictures of surfing is like a day, week, month, year with no sunshine. I’m one step closer to being the surf photographer i’ve always wanted to be.
the gods respond.
it seems that the gods delivered me the perfect birthday present. There hasn’t been any swell at all for weeks. not a wave in sight for at least a month. And yesterday, the 13th, was my birthday, and look what we have here. 5 days of escalating wave heights.
The swell is on it’s way.
As luck would have it, I’ll be in Mexico City for Monday night and all of Tuesday, so I may miss the peak, but hopefully the swell will kick around for a few more days.
Yee-haw!
Ruminations on ‘change’
In my post on photo advice, Colleen, wrote the following comment:
Colleen Says:
I think your pix are stellar, and the work you’ve put into them both shows and doesn’t, which, if you dig what I mean, you will take as the highest compliment.
I’m incredibly curious as to how you’ve managed this custom, ex-pat life…not b/c I’m looking to leave the 48, but b/c I’m intensely interestedc in crafting my own existence these days.
How I love the internets and the random tumbles down the rabbit holes…
I thought about the existence part of her comment and didn’t plan on writing anything too in depth, but as I started to write, I hit on some issues, that I don’t think I’ve addressed on the front page of this site, so after finishing my comment I thought it would be good to post this as it’s own entry:
Ed Fladung Says:
Hey guys, thanks for the great advice. it feels good to get positive feedback, sometimes posting to this site is like putting it out there into a giant vacuum.
Colleen, I don’t talk about it much, but I was fortunate enough to be able to move down here to work with my parents who were starting a big project and needed some help. and I was in a position to help. Hence it was sort of like jumping off a cliff, with a safety net. As far as crafting your own existence, believe me when i say that it has nothing to do with moving away from where you are and everything to do with changing your daily life rituals and job and all that. Taking six months off and living in a foreign country will most certainly help you alter your frame of mind, for sure, but it’s not entirely necessary.
What I’ve found, down here in mexico, is that for the first 6 months, I was really in vacation mode. or at least that’s how it felt. everything was new and foreign and safe. everyday was new and exciting, i didn’t quite know what i’d be doing everyday. but as time wore on, and I’m at 1 year now (almost) things have settled in and i have a familiar routine again and even though I’m living gloriously in a rich and vibrant culture, the normal routine is still there under the surface. this has more to do with my job than anything else. i’m sure if i was in a different line of work (non-computer) it might be different, but I have responsibilities and something I’m working towards. But I always keep in the back of mind, the thought that this could change at any moment.
For me, the biggest thing in my life that leads to a better existence is not money, free-time, location or even whether I’m content with my job, it’s surprisingly “change”. Most people fear change and I do too, but when my life is not in a largely defined group of routines is when I’m most happy. when my routine becomes concrete I starve for ‘change’. I think in my heart of hearts, my ideal life would be, being a travel photographer or something. but even then, i could see a routine in that.
But something always rings true to me when i hear the phrase “change is the only constant”.
By the way - it’s my thirty-first birthday today!
AK Girard
Alexander Kori Girard. Amazing illustrator/designer/artist and grandson of visionary Herman Miller designer. nice clean minimal site, it’s wonderful to see all his art. Go Kori Go!
Rediculous Airlines
File this under: Rediculous
You know mexican airlines have a monopoly that should be broken up, when it costs me $200 US more to fly from Puerto Vallarta to Puerto Escondido then it does for me to fly from Vallarta to New York City.
Relatedly, I hear that the government is about to privatize both Mexicana and Aeroméxico. In addition, there are several low-budget airlines that are going to be popping up, here in mexico (i’ve already started seeing signs for one called “Click”. This is a god-send. why? because it is so ridiculously expensive to travel by plane in Mexico that literally 99.9% of the population can’t afford a ticket. This issue is compounded by the fact that Mexico doesn’t have a proper highway infrastructure like us gringos do in the states. This makes getting around the country impossible.
Watching the airline monopoly die will be a big treat and will do great things for a country trying to bootstrap itself into the 21st century.
viva mejico!
Funicula
the best pizza ever. well, maybe not ever, but surely this side of New York. Next time you’re in Guadalajara, go to Funicula. I don’t exactly know how to get there myself. But be creative, look in the Yellow Pages or something. But do not miss it. Oh and get the sangria too, it’s not the strong wine stuff, it’s more of the soft drink variety.
