Category Archives: Life of Marcos

Jurassic Beyajad

This post will be mostly relevant to people I grew up with.

Jurassic Beyajad logo, from a screencap.

Back home, at the youth movement, we used to have a yearly movie festival. Me being me, would pour disporportionate amounts of effort into it and make sure the end result is as good as can be given the budgetary and technical limitations at the time.

One of my most famous films was “Jurassic Beyajad”, a parody of Jurassic Park. I thought all copies (well, the only copy) had been destroyed during the infamous “accidentally taped a telenovela over it” by Aby M. Recently a copy resurfaced. It appears I made one for my aunt Jave and she had Ari M. (coincidentally, Ari’s brother) digitize it along other home movies. And the quality is pretty good!

It was shot on our Sony Video 8 Handycam and edited on the floor of the playroom at my parents where a lot of the taping coincidentally also happend. I would hook up several VCRs, cameras, TVs, stereos, Discmans; and edit by carefully pressing Record / Play simultaneously on several devices.

Computer graphics/animations were done on Macromind Director and recorded straight from the screen of a PowerBook at the lowest brightness setting in a dark room, since recording CRT monitors would flicker due to the mismatch in refresh rates. I don’t remember who owned the PowerBook but I certainly didn’t have one at the time.

Watching this brought back a lot of memories. I shot and edited the damn thing so I remember the specific words and intonations, bloopers, etc. Lots of inside jokes in there, and many didn’t age well. But that’s art.

Here it is, enjoy!

And now let’s see if we can find a copy of “Yom Haatzmaut”, in which I have an alien aircraft blow up the club.

Poppy seed strudel from Budapest

My mother-in-law Nira just got back from Hungary, and she was kind enough to bring me some mohn love from The First Strudel House. And on her birthday of all days!

Just the thinnest crust… barely enough to keep the filling together.

Mohn strudel is not super common in these parts. And compared to the few in the area, this one had by far a much much higher filling-to-bread ratio. I remind readers that this is one of, if not the most important objective metrics when it comes to evaluating these things. The filling was also on the less sweeter side, which is a good thing when each delicious bite packs so much of it.

Is the box handmade? Or the strudel? Or both?

I hope this post serves both as a thank you note and as encouragement for others to bring me similar gifts.

The MKX® Copa América Tour

Our original Copa América plan was overly ambitious:

  • Day 1: Costa Rica vs Paraguay in Austin
  • Day 2: Hurricane Harbour in Houston
  • Day 3: Argentina vs Ecuador in Houston
  • Day 4: Canada vs Jamaica in Dallas
  • Day 5: Six Flags in Dallas
  • Day 6: Austin FC vs NYFC in Austin

That’s a lot. Finally we skipped the Austin FC match which was lucky since it was delayed over an hour due to inclement weather.

I will skip photos of the Argentina vs Ecuador quarterfinal match. Those deserve its own post.

Eclipse

We were incredibly lucky to have a total solar eclipse right over us on April 7, 2024. I was lucky to be there for 1991, but this was as a child in summer camp, and the staff wouldn’t let us all just go out and watch directly during totality. So in a way this is the first one.

We drove about an hour away to Smithville, TX in order to get a bit more time in totality. It was totally worth it. Our hosts were wonderful too and we had a great time. The clody weather turned out to not be a big problem as it was windy enough to give us nice clear views every now and then.

The photos are crappy phone pics with no tripod or anything. But they are my crappy phone pics for my own souvenir purposes. Go elsewhere for awesome shots.

COVID-19 II

On Thursday I woke up not feeling well. Body aches, slight headache, stuffy nose. Got worse throughout the day and I was eventually reduced to a human pile in bed. At night I tested:

Well, that blows.

So now I’m locked up in my room. Thankfully, Friday was a lot milder and I was mostly functional as a human. And most importantly, nobody in the family nor people I hung out with recently have tested positive or shown any symptoms so far. Saturday so far… still better on the body ache front but a weird dizzyness that I hope goes away after my coffee. We shall see.

This is the second time I get it, but the first time I was 100% asymptomatic and only tested because my kid tested positive.

I have no idea where I caught it and needless to say, there go my weekend plans. I’m so grateful to Shlomit and feel so bad that she needs to take care of locked up me in addition to both kids by herself while I’m quarantined… including on Mother’s Day. I’ll make it up!

Trader Joe’s Shakshuka Starter discontinued

UPDATE 8/22/2022: Rumor has it that Spicy Chunky Tomato & Pepper Sauce is the same product just packaged differently. I will confirm ir ASAP.

https://twitter.com/d_a_salas/status/1386415105710067715?s=21&t=MDobrDKhev-zlzYLx9Kt6A

Every time they were out at the store I would fear that the product was no more. That’s why I‘d keep the freezer in my garage I bought just for this stocked up.

RIP: Shakshuka Starter
Making Shakshuka and Turkish coffee for breakfast.

But now my worst fears are confirmed: Trader Joe’s excellent Shakshuka Starter has been discountinued. Please send them your feedback.

As it stands, I have no quick and easy way to get Shakshuka and my talented wife hasn’t made it in years.

One of my little helpers, filling up the shopping cart.

COVID-19

After nearly two years of bullet dodging, being fairly cautious, and three mRNA vaccines, my luck ran out and I tested positive for COVID-19. I feel perfectly fine. My kids got it too. So far and as far as we know, that’s it.

Thankfully, the CDC recently updated its guidance down to five days of isolation.

Here’s a time lapse of my test, which I stupidly started recording out of focus:

Snowpocalypse

As if a global pandemic wasn’t bad enough, February decided to bring us a record-breaking insane polar vortex.

I don’t even know what records were broken. But it was bad enough to bring the Texas electrical grid to its knees, break countless tree branches, and make pipes explode everywhere. We aren’t ready for it.

All temperatures in Celsius, of course.

How did we fare? Not too terrible: Schools were obviously cancelled for a bit over a week. We live in a very hilly neighborhood, and have a very steep driveway, so for a week our cars were stuck as everything was covered in ice. We had running water for the first half of it, but then lost water pressure. A leak in the roof became very apparent as the snow accumulated and started to melt. We lost power intermittently, but never for more than maybe 8 hours which means temperatures never dropped enough inside the house to force me to use the emergency wood for the fireplace.

But it was from from all bad: I enjoyed long walks around the white neighborhood using my makeshift snow shoes and we all had a blast sledding down our neighborhood park using an inflatable raft!