Beaver Island

The wedding was all-time, and I’d expect no less from the (now) DaBicas. Three days on the island with a lot of great people and a lot of catching up. It was an amazing place for an event like this. Even with the freak storm that came out of nowhere and left just as quickly leaving the island without power for the rest of the reception, or the predictions (before he left for the hospital)
that John Beaver was going to stay for the wedding and might die during the ceremony,nothing could put a damper on it.

Here’s the roundup of what I’ve got:

• A slideshow of the the best-of photos
• Galleries of images from the whole weekend – brace yourself for 900+ shots
• A quick video I took while trapped in my cabin with John Bowles as the storm was mellowing out. The screened in area is where he was sleeping and all his stuff was.

Jackass

They took this movie to the next level, and everyone in it deserves every penny they make from it.

“Was the dick hair really necessary?”

Jackass 2

Go tonight, it can’t not be good. I wish we could make it to PDX for the opening, sounds like it’s going to be a good time…

Third Anniversary

I can’t believe it’s already been 3 years since we were on a beach in Maui getting married. Easily one of the best trips ever, and getting married to Tara is one of the smarter things I’ve done. And, I scored a new 80 gig iPod and she’s getting a kickass new phone / PDA. How many megabytes does your PDA have? 24 megabytes. Ah, truly massive.

We’re coming up on the DaBica’s two-week anniversary, and I’ll have some photos up from Beaver Island any day now. I probably took more than 1000, and it’s some work to sort through it all.

The train that is my life has gone so far off the tracks that it’s pointless to try and fix. I’ve been on “vacation” for 6 days now at the beach, though it’s been more work than vacation and one of those days was a late-nighter in the office. Only two days of waves through all that, and a nasty jellyfish sting today all the way around my knee. I’m ready for a vacation from my vacation. I have a pile of updates to put on here if my life ever slows down.

Chaos

Just as I was making claims on my frequent updates… It’s been almost a month since the last update, because it’s been a month of absolute chaos. In the last 30+ days, we’ve only been home for 3 or 4 nights because:

House sitting round 1:

Consisted of watering tomatoes and sitting in hot tubs. Not a bad way to comehome from work, to what is essentially your dream house and just hanging
out. And, all a convenient 5 minutes from our own house.

House sitting round 2:
This time at my parents’ house which also included a pool, but not much time to spend in it because it also came with a black lab and a cat. Surprisingly no catastophes on this round.

10 days in Sarasota:
We pushed our luck with Ernesto, but made it out unscathed. It was mostly relaxing since we just sit on a beach all day, but Tara and I got nuts and decided to hit 4 Disney parks in 2 days. We hit the Animal Kingdom where we had never been, and it was pretty cool. We always have to go to the drive-in restaurant at MGM, and we had our other dinner at the Polynesian hotel where I felt like I might explode. They keep bringing steak and all sorts of other food as many rounds as you can handle. They gave us enough food for four people. We walked some serious miles and ended up with some big blisters, but it was definitely fun and worth the effort. We even snuck in a round of mini golf on “the most difficult mini golf course in the country.” That sucked, because yes, it was impossible. While we were there, Vin got married and hopefully everything went smooth. Shem sent some great photos. That same night was when Chuck Liddell kicked Renato Sobral’s ass in 1.5 minutes. We drove to every sports bar in Sarasota to see if anyone was showing the fight and no dice, and I finally just got a chance to see it a few days ago which is one of the
perks of being part of a cable company.

House sitting round 3:
We came back from Florida and resumed watching the animals. As much as we like them, we are definitely not getting a dog until we have a kid and are on lockdown.

The Germans and the beach:
Ernesto made its way up the coast, producing reports like this that only show
up once or twice a year:

I went out to the beach on Labor day to get a piece of this (the day after this report) and it was still pretty good. I really need more time in the water with all this crap going on. Tara’s grandmother’s sister is here from Germany with two friends, including a very loud and flamboyant 70 year old guy. We showed them around and had a good time.

Work:
Non-stop chaos that never slows down. We’re doing nothing but huge presentations left and right and operate in a perpetual state of putting out fires. Quake is what keeps everyone sane, and since we started playing, the skill levels have shot up and the games can get pretty heavy with a good share of carnage.

Freelance:
Built out a portfolio website for Jennifer and some business cards for other friends, with a bunch of other work waiting for my attention…

I’ve also been trying to get the Chevy out whenever the weather is good. Driving it makes everything good.

I also need to send out a belated salute to Ryan Coulter’s enormous balls.

Now, I just made it to New Hampshire and we’re out at the coast in Karen and Brent’s new house. Tomorrow we head for Beaver Island for the big wedding.

Stats

It’s been a while since I’ve checked out the stats for my site. Generally there’s some obvious numbers and things that make sense, some that are just interesting (like what countries some people are looking from), and things I never get around to figuring out. One of those is the Top Search Strings that somehow have something to do with my site, like:

• June: “well hung men in thongs pictures”
• July: “colleen boobs”
• August: “picturs of the real people that got eaten by a shark” (including typo)

Somebody high-five me for three consecutive days of updates, which I believe is a record for this site.

Speaking of Beaver Island…

In tribute to DaBica’s upcoming wedding, I dug into the archives for some Beaver Island photos. Pre-digital cameras, I used to take a lot of photos even on film. Here’s a mishmash of shots from that trip:

• DaBica, Bloods and Crips dinner
• Vin
• Beaver Island
• Full contact on the lake
• Carter, spinning the Lazy Susan

The most memorable part of that trip for just about anybody was getting chased (and an unlucky few, tackled) by a naked guy with a BB gun and a super soaker:

• Perg

Getting it right for summer

Every year at the end of summer I start kicking myself for pissing away my summer by getting caught up at work and not doing enough summery stuff. This year was on track for ing the same as usual, but that’s turned around now and the next month and a half are looking real good. We kicked it off this weekend by having Bird come over with a bag of 40 crabs that we ate until we couldn’t eat any more. From there we headed down to Delaware to hit the go-kart track where I’m starting to feel like a regular. Three races there, and every muscle in your body is hurting for days.

This was all good, but what’s getting our summer in gear is that we started house-sitting our home away from home. Nothing like coming home from work to a pool and a hot tub in the woods. We’re there for two weeks, and then the next day move on to watching another house, which also has a pool. We leave from there to spend 10 days on the beach in Florida, and come back for few more days of pool sitting.

Then, we head up to Hampton, NH, surf a quickie and head straight to Beaver Island to see DaBica get married. This will probably be only a slightly mellower version of the chaos that was our marketing retreat with JDK which was already a scary six years ago. From there we head straight to a four-bedroom beach house we’ve rented in Jersey for two weeks because it was such a steal. I’m going to commute to work from there for a week, and then blow off a week of work. There’s penty of room, so get down here. Things are looking really good right now, all we need is a few small storms.

Belmar

Saturday was Bird’s 30th birthday, so a bunch of people rallied down to the beach for a semi-suprise party. We headed over to Belmar, NJ because it’s close and easy, and I’d never been there before. We got there in the afternoon to find a really nice beach town – bajillion dollar homes, lots of grass which is unusual at the beach, and also lots of people because it was Saturday in July. We hooked up mid-afternoon and surfed for a few hours in the crowded mess of an ocean, but it was a good time. We didn’t think much more of this place than it looked really nice and it was really crowded.

It turned out, unsurprisingly, that the night before Bird got himself thrown out and banned from the bar we were all to meet at (and most people were going to be surprising him when they came down.) Little did we know what impact this would have… The plan was changed to head over to a bar called D’Jais (the witty lame name should have been a hint enough for what we were getting into.) As we walked up to the door and showed the meathead bouncers our ID’s, we could hear the really loud distorted techno coming out each time the doors opened. We walk in, get raped on a $12 cover charge, and it this point it becomes very difficult to put into words what was going through my mind. I felt like I had walked onto another planet – this was straight up fucking Dusk Til Dawn, except that rather than this place being packed with vampires, it was ‘roided out metrosexuals. It was a sea of Armani Exchange trucker hats and t-shirts with a hint of D&G here and there, overpriced ripped jeans, lame running shoes, and really bad tribal tattoos. The average shirt was about 2 sizes too small, the average guy had about a pound of hair goo in his hair, and I would imagine most of the dudes in there were carrying some kind of mirror on them to get a quick fix between self-admiration sessions. There was no question these guys took longer to get ready than the girls that were in there, who were caked in makeup and were all dressed in slutty trolling outfits. The thing that blew me away though, was that this was EVERY person in this club and there were hundreds of people in there. If you asked me to collect that many people like this to make a movie or something, I would not have thought it possible.

This is something I just didn’t think existed anymore – I remember this shit in Seaside Heights in the early 90’s, with people crusing their Irocs in wifebeaters and big gold chains, and I kept having flashbacks to the commercials for Growing Up Gotti (which I’ve never seen but now know who watches it.) It gets better though… We ended up at this place for four hours. I hadn’t eaten, so I decided to sneak out to grab a cheesesteak and eat it on the beach. The first food place next door had techno pounding where you ordered, but it was crowded so
I went to the next one. That place had the same shit music going too. It was a great break though to chill out and eat on the beach for a few minutes. When we finally left and stopped into Phil’s hotel late that night, the front desk had techno music going and had the lights down. Ummp chuh ummp chuh ummp chuh… It was as if this entire town had been taken over as soon as it got dark out.

It hurts

Yesterday was super fun in Jersey, we finally timed it right with some storms and got really good waves. To top it off, it’s trunk weather now. After 4 hours straight of out-of-shape paddling, I felt like I got hit by a train when I got up today. I got up and jumped on a plane this morning to gaurantee the rest of my body seizing up. I also get to spend the next two days on planes to seal the deal.

Speaking of surfing, it’s dinner time up at the Cape where we used to surf every now and then. I had a link to a better, more graphic story of the seal getting eaten, but it’s gone now. This is exactly why we don’t miss surfing in Oregon.