Sunday, August 30, 2009

Sunday Night!

I'm writing a blog entry come hell or high water!

Really since Friday nothing super exciting has happened. It was a quiet weekend of watching sports and relaxing, which is a good thing because I needed a quiet week.

I spent most of the weekend researching Iceland since I'm going there in a less than 2 weeks, which is pretty awesome! People have been asking, "why Iceland?" a fair amount lately so I figured I would explain a tiny bit. The gist of the story is going somewhere people haven't been before. Everybody out here has been to Hawaii or Alaska and I know tons of people who have been to Italy, or Paris, or London, et al. Nobody I really know has been to Iceland so that chance to go somewhere that hasn't been visited by a ton of my friends first is nice. It also helps the value of the currency has gone down by one half so it will be significantly cheaper to go now than it was this time last year.

I still haven't gotten rid of my old TV yet. I think I'm going to work from home one day in order to have it picked up by a recycling group as there is supposedly a ton of mercury in the old TV tubes. I'm not sure however.

As a side note: I've been watching The Wire and it an excellent show. I'm about 1/3 of the way through Season 4 (of 5) and it's riveting. Netflix it or something people it's worth the effort.

NPR is excellent. Listen to it as well.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Beer Friday

My place of employ is providing beer today for the underlings to drink. It's a shameless attempt to build team spirit and camaraderie; but it worked. I'm drinking a beer at my desk thinking how much I like working here. Beer is tasty.

I also got a filling on Monday that was hella deep. I almost felt guilty about eating out of the 5lb bag of gummy bears on my desk. Is it Gummy or Gummi?

There is a channel in Seattle called KIRO2 which apparently is RTV or Retro Television and I'll be watching a lot of Maghum PI, Simon & Simon, and Airwolf now that I've found this channel. If they start doing The A Team I might have to quit my job. Speaking of The A Team, my mom called me at work not to long ago to tell me they were making a live action movie of the TV Show. She might have been more excited by seeing a new Murdoch than I was.

This weekend can't come soon enough.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Calling It A Career

Yep. I threw away my Dreamcast today. I checked, it's not worth the time or effort to sell the stupid thing so I threw it away. It was all part of my "I should unpack the stuff from three moves ago" Sunday night that saw me throwing away lots of crap. I don't have a ton of space so I need to periodically go through my stuff and chuck stuff to prevent me from being a total pack rat, if i haven't needed it after 2+ years in Seattle it might as well go in the trash. Whatever I keep will end up a little more organized at that, like the POS voting notebook.

The rest of the weekend was spent thinking about kites. On Friday a trip to the Long Beach (WA) Kite Festival was undertaken. A few thoughts.

People take their kites seriously. There were maybe 500 - 1000 kites in the air along the beach and some of them were seriously the size of school bus. There were competitions for sport kites and performing aerobatic tricks and it was pretty impressive and it kind of made me want to get a kite but I didn't, see first paragraph.

Long Beach Washington is pretty cool by itself. There is a lot of history around the area because Lewis and Clark finished their trip along the Columbia there and with the serious tides and currents there are a ton of ships wrecked along the coast. After screwing around in the surf for and hour or two I would attest that the currents are strong. After we were done the Kite Festival people were very adamant that going in the surf was tantamount to trying to yourself drowned. I managed to sunburn the top of my feet as well. That hurts.

Nothing else exciting happening. Going to Iceland in 3 weeks so the countdown continues. I'll remember to bring my camera to Iceland - unlike Long Beach.

Feel like that's it for this week. I'll try to post more but that usually ends poorly.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Another post

I'm trying to get into the routine again. It's a pain in the butt to be sure.

This week was relatively active however. I went to a Mariner game on Wednesday that ended in the bottom of the 14th with one Ken Griffey Jr. hitting a game winning single to drive in the winning run. It was a little surreal to think Griffey is in his late 30's and still playing baseball but I guess even a ghost of ones former self can have some talent. It was a weird game since it was a 1 - 0 final. I saw a guy get throw out at home, various double plays, and several people picked off, Podsednik got picked off third in maybe the 11th which was just surreal to watch.

This weekend I went to Tacoma and saw the Museum of Glass, drove over the Tacoma Narrows bridge, not this one (here is video), and went to a Tacoma Rainiers game. The Rainiers are the AAA affiliate of the Seattle Mariners. For a mere $25 you can sit in the second row of a AAA baseball game and it's a hell of a deal. The Rainiers were playing the Iowa Cubs so between the two teams I recognized maybe a 1/3 of the players. So Taguchi still stinks.

This weekend is also hempfest but I will not be attending this year. I can would only go down to laugh at the weird stinky hippies but this year I had stuff going on on, and frankly, the hippies aren't really all that cool. Maybe I'll head down again next year. I hope the little shits don't pull the fire alarm in my building again... man do I sound like and old man.

Rachel - great boob post.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

5 Weeks

That's how long it will be until I leave for Iceland. That's right I'm going to Iceland for a week or so and it will be awesome. Reasons for going to Iceland:

1. I can always go to Hawaii / Alaska since I'm Seattle.
2. It was way way cheaper than I would have expected for a direct flight.
3. Europe / Asia and various other places are well traveled.

I just wanted to go somewhere different and do something that not everybody else does. Like eat a Puffin. I'm not sure if Puffins will be in season but they sure look tasty.

Right now I'm drinking a Mt. Dew but it's a special throwback edition made with real sugar instead of using HFCS - High Fructose Corn Syrup - and I can actually tell the difference between regular Mt. Dew and "throwback" Mt. Dew. I'm not sure which one tastes better to be truthful but they're both delicious. Mmmmm.

All those trips to Scranton paid off. One of the events I went to PA for was really successful and the team I was on was rewarded with an All - Company award. Since most of the rest of the team was in PA I was selected to go in front of our Quarterly meeting and receive the award in front of about 2000-3000 people which was a little disconcerting but it was worth it.

This last Wednesday I went to a "friendly" soccer game between FC Barcelona and Seattle. 66,000 people went to Qwest field to watch one of the best English Premier League teams crush the Seattle MLS team. Soccer in the states has a long way to go but it was fun to see a world class team and the crowd was great. I'm not the biggest soccer fan in the world or anything but as a sports fan in general I think I'm starting to get the appeal of soccer. Watching it live is far superior than watching on TV (which is ok at best) but it reminds of Hockey with the constant motion and the way the game is fluid. Far fewer stops and starts than most American sports and generally cheaper too. Go Seattle FC I guess.

Nothing else really going on. I still have to get rid of the giant old TV. There are ways to recycle it and ways to throw it away. I'll figure that out this week I guess.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

It's a post.

Once again it's been a while since I've posted, mostly because summer is a busy time and there are other things going on but here we go.

The 4th of July came and went and Seattle does a pretty solid firework show. They shoot fireworks off of Lake Union from a barge in the center and they do it right. Constant shells instead of spreading it out over way too long. The Sunday after I went to a Everett Aquasox game. The Aquasox are the short season (SS) Single A team of the Mariners and for $15 you sit about 5 rows from the game and can heckle the ump. Minor league baseball is well worth the money and effort to attend because you are much closer to the action and it's more about the fan experience than anything. The Aquasox ended up winning 15-14 in about the highest scoring game I've ever attended at any level that I can remember.

The was a kickball tournament and the Sexual Harassment Panda's went 2 - 1 but ended up getting screwed out of the playoffs due to some bad management out the kickball tourney. They did have party buses to drive people to and from bars for the enjoyment of the kickball participants and fans. It was good times and people had fun on a hot day which is about all you can ask.

The next weekend was a trip to North Dakota for the wedding of a cousin. My family is huge so I'll spare the details but Andrea is my age and we did a lot of stuff together back in the day at the various family events. Yay to Andrea for having the biggest family wedding I can remember in forever. I drove around a fair amount and saw Lisbon, Sheldon, Enderlin, and quite a bit of Fargo. The Red River Valley Fair is a great view of humanity in ND and a good reminder that people are grown big out there. At 6ft I'm usually towards the top of the height scale at events but between the wedding and the fair I felt positively average and that doesn't normally happen to me that often.

I went to Scranton PA for the 7th time since November and I've come to the conclusion that the greater Scranton area isn't that terrible. I'm tired of going there for work so I am no longer a happy camper when I go there. Good things have happened as a result of all those trips out to Scranton but I'm still hoping not to go back there anymore if I can help it.

Seattle hit 103 this last week and while it gets that hot most other parts of the country it's not supposed to get that hot here. Seattle has very mild temps and extremes are not really common events. 103 is particularly bad because most of the city doesn't have air conditioning so it's not that people can't handle the heat it's that they don't get a reprieve from it at all. The worst part is I have a window AC unit that won't fit into any of the window's in my place. Suckage. It's still in the 80's everyday which people bitch about, whatever, I don't really complain unless it hits 90.

Does anybody know how to recycle / throw away a 32 inch big screen old school TV? Mine blew the tube a few weeks ago and I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. Taking it to the dump seems wrong and it doesn't actually work so I can't give it to goodwill either. I'm thinking I'll probably have to pay to get it taken away and disposed of properly as I'm sure this beast has some nasty crap on the inside. I got this my sophomore summer of college when I was working at UPS and because Jay cares about these things I know it's 10 years old as well. RIP football TV 1.

Today I had a leak problem with my garbage disposal and managed to spread all over my kitchen floor. It has been an eventful day to say the least. Between a good breakfast, some grocery shopping, laundry, a disposal leak, and eating Ice Cream I am totally pooped and this has been a long ass blog.

More to come - I promise.