easy come, easy go

well, today had some real ups and downs.

the ups - a nice breakfast at the extreme hotel, a great beach walk*, a pretty sunset to go along with a huge rainbow over cabarete bay, a client still seriously considering a hotel property, and a new phone** to play with.

the downs - well, in a matter of 1 second, i managed to get both my phone and camera immersed in a wave. :-( at the end of a beautiful beach walk with my mom, we had a bit of a disaster. a wave came a bit too close to us, my mom stumbled, and a shoe was lost. as i was preparing to retrieve the shoe, another wave came up, washed over my camera that i had stupidly placed on my flip flops in the sand and not far enough up the beach. somehow my phone then slipped out of my hand too, as i scrambled to try to save the camera. in this whole commotion, my sunglasses also came off, but i did recover those - only just though as they were barely sticking out from the sand. this was utter chaos and needless to say very upsetting.

veronica and i spent like 2 hours drying out the phone and camera. the camera miraculously looks like it may be OK. we'll see if the salt water corrodes it and it stops working sometime soon. as far as the nokia 6600 goes, that's caput. finito. done. :-( we even tried to take it apart to help with drying it out, but we didn't have the right tools. i don't think it would have helped anyway.

luckily i have another phone that was a toss-aside from rich. it's a windows mobile device from some 3rd tier manufacturer and at a somewhat beta stage. i started loading it up with contacts and customizing and then was having fun with it. the phone actually takes pretty good pictures (for a phone). with it, i managed to capture the rainbow that we saw on cabarete beach at sunset hour. here are some other shots from that hour.

facing into the sunset...


wait, soccer? aren't they supposed to be into baseball in this country?


at the end of the day, i have another phone, the camera is working, my mom has her other shoe, and my sunglasses weren't scratched somehow. a very different picture from those first few moments after that wave hit!