Sway's Weekend Music Pick: "Hideaway" by Karen O and the Kids

Featured in the film "Where the Wild Things Are" (— which I really, really wanted to like but just couldn't. Sorry. I love this song, though.)

About Whale-Watching & Other Things

Over Labor Day weekend, my boyfriend and I, plus my sister and her boyfriend, plus eight of their friends (also mostly couples) — traveled to Newport Beach, California. We stayed in a rental property on Balboa Peninsula that was one row over from the sand, and it was a pretty darn near perfect way to spend a weekend. Especially since we were all going from temperatures hovering around 110 degrees here in Phoenix to the wonderful 70-something degrees on the coast.

In case you weren't counting, that's 12 people. All under one roof. And no, we didn't end up killing one another by the end of the weekend, but I will say this: If you are aware that you snore as loudly as, say, the sound a tractor makes were it to drive into a house, then please, please, do the right thing and sleep in a closet with the door shut. It's the polite humane thing to do.

Many of the other people along for the weekend were younger than my boyfriend and me. Not that it makes much of a difference — the two of us are like the oldest young people I know. Anyway, my point is, while the rest of them wanted to do things like bar-hop during the afternoons and evenings, my boyfriend and I wanted to do nerdy things like go whale-watching (see photo above).

I took this photo on Saturday morning off the coast of the Somewhere-Between-Newport-Beach-and-Laguna-Beach area, and it shows the back of a blue whale. At least, I trust that it's a blue whale. That's what the boat's captain told us. So I'm gonna go with that.

Did you know ... (Do any of you watch the TV show "Bones"? Any time I say "Did you know ..." I try to say it in the same tone and voice as Vincent, aka Mr. Nigel-Murray. It's a fairly recent development, as I only began watching the series on Netflix this year. He's a funny character, right? How he's always bringing up random factoids that, at first, don't seem at all related to whatever murder case the team happens to be investigating, but then moments later are revealed to actually tie in quite soundly. Such a good show. But I digress ...) Ahem. Did you know ... that the blue whale is the largest animal known to have ever lived on this here planet Earth? It's true. Even taking all the dinosaurs into consideration.

The boat we were whale-watching on was 65 feet long, and our boat's captain estimated that this blue whale was about 85 feet long. How he can be so sure, like I said, is a wonder, but I'm going to go ahead and accept it as fact. Apparently, blue whales can grow to be nearly 100 feet in length. To get some idea of the scale of that, click here.

We also saw pelicans, California sea lions and common dolphins. All in all, the whale-watching trip was a pretty cool experience. I also want to point out that I found a discount which lowered each of our tickets by 50%. That's right — it would have cost us $60+ for both of us to go, but instead it only cost $30+. Which meant more money for doing other things, such as going to the Aquarium of the Pacific. (Which, by the way, was open for extended hours that weekend, with entry being half-price after 5 p.m. I was on a roll!)

By the way, our snoring friend — we'll call him Jack, as in Jackhammer — was not allowed back into the room for a second night. The room's occupants, which included my boyfriend and me, plus another couple, all folded up Jack's roll-away bed, carried it down the stairs and set it back up in the dining room. And then slept far better that night.

The end.