Game on

A bunch of us at work have been playing the Quake 4 demo on the network, and today we threw down and bought the full versions. There’s going to be a lot of late work nights now, I’m having flashbacks from the adidas building after work in Portland…

Memorial Day weekend

Last weekend was a great weekend. Despite having to do some work over the holiday, we made the most of the three days. In that time we picked up Tara’s new car, got some wetsuits we had ordered so long ago I don’t remember, went to three lacrosse games, and spent a day in dirty Jersey surfing. Tara’s Mazda Tribute is the worst car either of us have ever had, and at 70,000 miles was moments away from becoming a total money pit. In the last 2 years it’s probably been towed 4 times from breakdowns, got a new transmission at 60,000 miles, and we’ve spent way too much money fixing it already and we were about due for another big payout. So we traded it in and got a new Toyota FJ. It’s a nice replacement for the old van we no longer have, with the added benefit of being able to drive over things. We picked it up Saturday morning and needed to break it in, so we drove straight to the NCAA lacrosse finals in Philly just in time to watch UVA hand Syracuse a serious beatdown, then swung by to show the parents the new car, and went on to our next game which was Philly’s “pro” lacrosse team the Barrage. Since there’s not a lot of money in professional lacrosse, the level of play is nowhere near what you get at an NCAA game but they’re still fun games to go to and we got season tickets this year. You can tell by the attendance at the season opener that they have a long way to go.

I spent the next day surfing and realizing how out of shape I am. In between being in the water, I smeared some sunblock on my wet self which worked in some spots but not others, so my stomach is a little zebra-striped right now. We hung out with Denny and Kim’s new dog who is in training to kill anything with wings. The beach was so good we blew off going back to Philly for the Division II finals, but headed right back on Monday morning to watch UVA finish their season 17-0 by completely thrashing U-Mass in the finals, after we got in some tailgating in the FJ. Now I am back to work and this is all behind me and waiting for this weekend which will involve a demolition derby…

The flooding in New England

Nick sent me a batch of photos he took of the flooding up in York right
now. This shit is unbelievable, not something you’d ever imagine on the New England coast. We were just up there 2 weeks ago to open the season with some kickass waves the whole time we were there.

Is anyone here a doctor?

Last night, coming home from our flag football game Tara and I were at an intersection on the way home where we could tell there was a car parked in a pretty unusual spot facing us off the road. Nobody was stopping or doing a thing, but when we got up there we realized a Honda just broadsided a Porsche going pretty fast. There were no cops, no people, just the two drivers. The guy in the Honda was pretty banged up. His head had a lump the size of my fist, and his knee was bleeding a ton and it turned out that something had gone through his knee cap. Tara got to practice her ER skills because the cop that showed up was pretty clueless and the first medical guy there wasn’t all that dialed either. She ended up getting the guy situated and the collar brace on his neck until the EMT’s showed up, and got his knee bandaged. It was pretty crazy, absolutley nobody had stopped to help out. Since I am far from being a medical professional or professional of any sort, I just hung out and took some photos…

Speaking of fish drama…

We had a pretty cool blue fish that was looking pretty haggard and pathetic. The other night we noticed his stomach was unusually huge and we weren’t quite sure what to do. He ended up exploding overnight, literally.

The fish tank

Last year for my birthday, Tara surprised me with a gift certificate for a fish tank. We went out and picked a big one so it would be easy to maintain, figured it would be roomy and nothing to worry about. We got a batch of small community fish so we wouldn’t have to deal with any fish needs, but this all turned out to be a small world with big drama. Every now and then we would go out an pick up a new one because we had lots of room. One of the first ones we got was a fish whose model name was some kind of shark (only because it resembled one, not a real shark.) He looked pretty happy at the fish store so we bought him and dumped him into the tank. He sank to the bottom and laid there like he was dead, every now and then getting up to move around a little. Then, over the next few days he laid there for so long that we were sure he was dead and it was time to flush him. I grabbed the net, went to scoop him up and he spring back to life and went ballistic, shooting all over the tank running into the glass at each end and then he lodged himself into a plant and stayed there. We clearly bought a fish with serious mental issues, but that’s cool; he can hang out by himself in the plant if he chooses, or he can lay on the bottom, or when he’s feeling really crazy, he’ll stand upright on his tail for 30 minutes at a time.

We also picked up some kind of small catfish and because he was the coolest fish ever, he was and will be the only fish in this tank to get a name. He is The Catatafish because he resembled the one that Lemmiwinks ran into in Mr. Slave’s ass. Here’s a shot of him and our “shark” for a split second where the shark was acting normal. Or, you can see him with the shark in the shark’s more likely mentally unstable state. So the Catatafish is cool, right? He actually swims around like a shark, goes really fast and stirs up the water, and gives you a show. He grew at a really fast pace, and before we knew it, he had gone from about 3″ to about 8″. We also had a school of 10 small fish that gradually got smaller and smaller until there were two left and we realized that someone was consuming them, obviously the fish that was getting really fat. Along the way one of those ten committed suicide and threw himself out of the tank when I left it open and he eventually died after he jumped the equivalent of 100 stories below after he bounced around on the carpet for a little bit. There’s been a lot of drama in the tank – cannibalism, births, more cannibalism, deaths, suicide attempts, successful suicides, the tank overflowing all over the kitchen floor, etc.

We ended up taking the Catatafish back to the fish store before anyone else got eaten. The shark still does his usual, as you can see him standing here with his favorite plant. Every few days he snaps out of it and shoots around the tank and usually ends up getting a small cut on his nose where he runs into whatever gets in his path. That’s the life in our fish tank.

Oregon is the new Vermont

With Vin and the future Meghan Lavecchia moving to Portland, that city has tipped to be the offical replacement for Burlington, just a little bigger and wetter.
With people like the Birches, the Reeds, the Coulter and Gubkins, Kegler, and Schriber all ending up there, it must be a pit-stop until people realize it’s time to move to Philly. We’ll be here waiting.

Best wedding ever

It’s been a few years since we got married, but I never really got around to showing many people that weren’t there anything much from it. Since I have other people’s weddings on here, I figured I better do at least something for mine. Tara and I decided that we wanted a small wedding somewhere cool where we could surf a lot, so we decided to head to Maui. We decided to bring along 18 or so friends and family and make it a week-long event. Since we were asking a lot for people to come all the way to Hawaii, we decided we better make it fun. After sending our invites in boxes full of supplies for a trip like this, we followed them up with postcards every few days up until the wedding to keep people pumped up for the trip. It ended up being a week long party with everything from surfing to luaus. We rented a few huge condos with lots of food and booze so we had everything we needed.

Nick LaVecchia was the obvious choice for a photographer since we wanted friends to surf with. He took a pile of amazing photos throughout the entire trip to add to the 1500 or so that I took myself. Anyway, it turned out to be one of the best trips ever, with pretty much everyone asking when the reunion would be before we even left. I’ve got way too many pictures to put up to do the trip justice, so instead I will include the trailer for
our 3 hour wedding video. It makes sense that if your wedding kicks ass, your video is worthy of a trailer. If you hear sound but don’t see any video, you’ll need to update your Flash player.

First real party

A few weeks ago we had our first real party for UFC 57 to watch Chuck Liddell KO Randy Couture. Our house went relatively unscathed except for the walls of one of our bathrooms covered with puke drips which I then painted over with the wrong color white, which is another story… People were either really drunk or really sober and not much in between, but they managed
to contain all the spills in the kitchen.

Here’s the best of, give it a minute to load.

Vegas

I had two kickass trips this month to where anything goes (Vegas), once for CES and the other for SIA. After two years away from the show, it seems to have gotten a little bit of life pumped back into it. We caught up with lots of people (1, 2, 3) we hadn’t seen in a while. Some people were up big, like Aaron Draplin who had to wrap his chips in hundreds, which is a problem I didn’t have this month. Other people get sucked into the smutty side, but there’s no better place to be sucking down beers than the Double Down, half the reason to go to Vegas in the first place.