The sea, the sand, the bands

The BDCN Summer Outing finally pushed through last weekend, and what a weekend it was. The weather cooperated with us long enough to fully enjoy whatever was planned in the program.

After arriving and having lunch, we went snorkeling a mile off the beach, and it was my first time. It took a while to get the hang of breathing through my mouth instead of my nose while biting on the air feeder hard enough to keep the salt water from filling my lungs. Disappointingly, we didn’t see too much coral (reportedly due to last month’s storm) but I still managed to see a few nifty things. There were jellyfish as big as my head, a color-changing cuttlefish, a blue sea star, low-swimming skates and the vague outline of an octopus taking a nap in a cave.

Our boat motored its way back to the beach just in time for the games, which I wasn’t really looking forward to. The rains conspired to sabotage them with a sudden downpour, but cleared up enough for the evening’s battle of the bands—the real reason I was in this outing.

We were six bands in all, but there was only one deserved winner and it sadly didn’t come from my team. Our band didn’t disappoint as we sang all upbeat songs. I tried getting people to move to Maroon 5’s “Sunday Morning” but I ended up getting joked the next day for taking to the stage drunk or drugged, hahaha! I gotta hand it to Tropical Monsoon though; they did our team proud by bagging second place. Had they chosen a better ending song, they would have brought home the bacon.

The rest of the time the guys were playing water polo in the pool, flag football and volleyball on the beach, and billiards, ping-pong and darts indoors.

It wasn’t the most eventful outing, but it sure made a lot of memories. My trusty Nikon FM SLR brought home two rolls of mementos for my team to fawn over on Monday.
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Waiting for me at home was Uncle Butch’s promised graduation gift. I remember he wrote me about it back in my graduation in January, but I pretty much forgot about it until last Sunday.

I really didn’t have any idea of what it would be, but was I surprised to be the owner of a Sony CD Mavica digital camera. With it came a starter set of twenty 8cm CD-Rs and a CD-RW, one of them already loaded into the camera and with three pictures of the Chaingan family dog, Lucy.

It’s not new and it’s rather bulky, but I’ve read the MVC-CD500 was top-of-the-line three years ago, already packing a 5-megapixel CCD array—not too shabby! Unlike my mom’s Canon Digital Ixus 5, itself a 5-megapixel point-and-shooter, my CD Mavica has full manual control (shutter speed, aperture, even focus), a Carl Zeiss 3x optical zoom lens with decent range (~30-100mm), and a five-contact hot shoe for attaching external flash units.

It was just a shame it didn’t arrive in time for the outing. Many thanks, Uncle Butch! I’ll put this thing to good use.
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Looks like I have enough money left over to buy some nifty stuff and have savings too. Suddenly that MG God Gundam doesn’t seem so far away.