I just landed in LA and I’ll be here for a total of 15 hours before turning around to go home. I’m staying on the ocean in Santa Monica and I don’t think I’ll even see it…

 

We found the only indoor place around for playing paintball, so we headed up there last night with a group of people and burned through a lot of green paint. I’m probably going to be spending a lot of time there now that winter might actually be here.

 

I just found these images from the beach at Christmas. This lawn display tells the full story of Christmas – manger, Santa Claus, Snoopy, and the Dallas Cowboys.

 

I got back from CES last night, a little worked from walking lots of miles and I’ve aquired a new cold. Nothing more unusually exciting happened, besides finding the best sushi restaurant. After attempting getting a table at the not-a-chance-during-CES Nobu, I drove around with Alex and Derrick from Griffin looking for a sushi place. After we decided to settle for a ghetto-looking restaurant next to a ghetto nail place, we walk in to find a really nice looking restaurant with lots of empty tables which doesn’t happen anywhere during CES. It gets better though – when we order they ask if we want a la carte or all you can eat, which we find out is $22 for anything on the menu, as long as you finish it. It turns out the sushi was excellent, and since it’s tough to turn down free sushi, it became somewhat of an eating competition between Alex and I. By the time we left we were ready to throw up everywhere, and I’ll claim Alex threw in the towel first. If you’re going to SIA, make sure you go here. It’s called Yama Sushi, and it’s on Flamingo.

 

This place is complete chaos. 140,000 people are in town for this show, and they are all standing in my way. I walked a lot of miles today, too bad I can’t track how many. Here’s the highlights:

The new, mousatchioed Alex Birch

Looks like we need to black out Tara’s truck

I can’t figure out why anything with 4 wheels would ever need a subwoofer this big

This is how I felt halfway through the day

 

I landed in Vegas a few hours ago. Since I was unsure of my ability to make it there the rest of the trip, I went straight to In N Out Burger before even checking in. Ummmm mmmmm.

I’m staying at the Exalibur, and it’s as horrible as I remembered it. I haven’t been in here in years, but nothing has changed. There is one positive though, some top-notch art in the bathroom.

 

I got the new gun yesterday on the way to playing in Jersey, where we hooked up with Denny Bruce for some good games. It’s now January and it was 73 degrees there. If I wasn’t so focused on playing paintball instead of snowboarding, I’d be seriously depressed right now. Try to go ride is absolutely pointless right now unless we travel somewhere off the east coast and that probably wouldn’t happen until spring so I guess I’ll just keep on shooting people. Anyway, I had picked up a starter gun that I thought would last me a few months and I’d upgrade, but I made it a month. We walked in, they had one of the two brand new models I was looking for, and next thing I knew I was putting some serious damage on my credit card. We headed over to field that was pretty empty because it had rained the day before. Since this was the warmest weather I’ve played in, I had some pretty thin layers on and I left there with my torso looking like 50 Cent’s gunshot wounds (besides the fact I’m white and have a good layer of fat running over my six pack now) – completely covered in welts. Tara got bunkered and took a shot in the ass from about 3 feet away from a gun that was set way too high, and has a round bruise about 4 inches across with a bunch of round rings inside it. She was kicking ass with her new pink gun racking up some kills, and the best part of the day was playing a series of back to back two on two matches with her and I against Adam from work and Denny, no refs.

This gun is all time, down to the "white trash NJ bass boat metallic flake" hopper.

This photo doesn’t even do her bruise justice, it’s a lot darker now…

I’m a plane to the CES show in Vegas right now, gearing up for three days of chaos. This show makes the SIA show look like a regional trade show it’s so huge. There’s nothing like walking around miles of show that make you feel like you need to update every single electronic device in your house.

 

So I spend a bunch of time wrestling with this fucking website of mine and I get it to the point where everything is on the money. No major quirks, things are looking good, and it’s getting late. Because I hate the piece of crap Internet Explorer, I never use it. At the last minute last night I check the site to make sure it works in IE and a big chunk of it appears halfway down the page, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. Anyway, for now hopefully you’re looking at this in Firefox or Safari or something. Apparently my trial and error form of coding doesn’t quite cut it today.

Now for the quick catch up… We made our way to Nashville a few weeks ago to hang out with the Birches. 4 days of playing the Nintendo Wii and picking up kids pretty much crippled my right arm, but it was a lot of fun. We hit the famous Hatch Show Print, swung by Griffin to check out Alex’s new office and world of iPod accessories, hit the Loveless Cafe, and pretty much anything else (besides the Jack Daniels factory) that Tennessee has to offer.

We had a moderately mellow Christmas and New Year’s, everything went pretty smoothly. No complaints…

Tara’s birthday was on the 28th, famously shared with another person screwed with a birthday too close to Christmas, Christian DaBica. We decided to head into NYC and spend the night since we don’t get there enough, and stayed at the chi chi SoHo Grand. My parents and Tara’s mom and grandmother came in to surprise her for dinner at Asia de Cuba, which was exceptionally good. Somehow it seems like every time that I’m in the giant city of New York, I run into people I know and this trip was no exception. We were stoked to run into the Capozzis roaming around SoHo. It was great to see them, it’s been a while. They are the next batch of VT transplants to land in Oregon, taking the roundabout way by living in SoCal first…

We’ve been playing a bunch of paintball, trying to make an every weekend thing. It sucks you in just like snowboarding. I’m already working on getting a second gun, and Tara just had the most badass pink gun show up today, so tomorrow is going to be another good outing. I knew I was getting a starter gun I’d upgrade pretty quickly, but I didn’t think it would happen in less than a month. We picked the right year to dive into this, it’s now January and is going to be 68 degrees tomorrow. Every weekend we’ve gone has been epic weather, good thing we haven’t been trying to go snowboarding.

We watched Chuck Liddell hand out another slaughter to Tito Ortiz. Good fight.

Speaking of riding, we’re heading up to VT next weekend with hopes of getting out, but it’s not looking too good. If anyone is left in VT, get in touch because we want to hang out. Woot woot.

 

I finally bit the bullet and I’m working on incorporating real blog software into my site to make things a little easier. I should hopefully have everything up in a few days… Maybe someday I’ll update the pile of photos I have ready to go too.