Sasquatch

This weekend I went to George, Washington to attend Sasquatch. A festival held every year at the most visually stunning music venue I've ever seen or heard of. The stage is set so the Columbia River Gorge is in the background with cliffs and massive amounts of open space. It is downright crazy. Watched a few bands play and Two Gallants stuck out, Electrolane (girl power rock), and The Arcade Fire were all good. Citizen Cope was awful. Ugh.

To get to the Gorge you have to drive over the Cascades throught Snoqualmie pass to get to central Washingon. It's really hard to explain how crazy mountains and snow pack are. It is a pretty amazing thing and most people do it every day and don't realize how beautiful it really is. It's true - you don't realize what you have until it's gone. Wow!

Right now I'm watching the Indy 500 and debating whether I should brave the wonderful Seattle mist to do something outdoorsy today. On second thought I think I might go tomorrow when it's supposed to be sunny and very nice. Weather like that sounds like a good time to go hiking and get up high up into some of the aforementioned snow covered mountains.

I'll post some pictures of this Gorge and various other things I've been meaning to highlight since I've been out here. I've got them ready to go but I need to buy a computer and post them. Two time consuming steps.

Fight for your right...

Amazon sells a boatload of books.

This is evidenced by the counter on the homepage approaching 700,000 presold copies of Harry Potter. Since we are a large bookseller one of the perks is Amazon holds something called Fishbowls. A fishbowl is basically an appearance by an author promoting a book for Amazon employees. A few weeks ago I saw Cal Ripken talking about baseball and how he used to give signs to the catcher, who would in turn relay them to the pitcher. Ben McDonald apparently sucks. He also wrote a kids book about the dubious honor of starting the 88 season off with 21 straight loses. Anyway, in a couple weeks Russell Simmons is speaking and I think this might be the most entertaining speaker to come in since I've been here. Simmons basically started the commerical rap movement in the 80's with Run DMC and later on Def Jam records. An entrepreneur and influential member of the african american community I'm sure he'll have a lot to say with the recent Imus mess and upcoming elections. He apparently has come out in support of Dennis Kucinich oddly enough.

On an unrelated note, if you ever get a moving stipend for "incidentals" during a big move such I've just made, don't spend the bulk of the money on a party. You really do incur a bunch of incidental expenses. I hadn't anticipated buying all the condiments the movers couldn't take with and I've spent a lot of money in the last few days buying stuff that I had to leave behind or throw away during the course of the move.

I'm buying a memory card for my camera before I go hiking this weekend so I hope to have some pretty cool pictures of Puget Sound, the Seattle skyline, and the Olympic Mountains. I need to take advantage of the outdoors or else I'll start to take it for granted.

I have a blog.

So I moved to Seattle a few weeks ago. My friend Jay has been hounding me to start posting on my blog so here is the first official entry. In a few days/weeks I intend to format this so it looks like something and start posting some pictures. I think there might be 2 people in the world who know about the blog so I'm not too worried yet. I'm going to a concert later tonight - Britt Daniel of Spoon - at a place called the Crocodile. Supposedly the Crocodile is the place where Nirvana got their start. I'm sure how much I buy that but it's a good story. I've now been to Neumo's, The Showbox, and soon The Crocodile and the Croc has a lot to live up to.

Good times.