Reports from the rainy northwest

Sigh, they added a road hump to the cross-street a little ways down from Justin.  Yes, I rarely come that way but I do occassionaly and this just pisses me off.  The road doesn't lead too anywhere so there is no reason to have the hump.  There isn't anything across the street that would lead to kids crossing the street often either.  As far as I can tell, there little to no reason for the road hump much like most of them.

 

Most road humps are put into place because too many people are driving down a particular street too fast.  Hmm, you have too many people on a road?  Perhaps something should be done to aleviate traffice elsewhere.  They try to redirect traffic flow using the humps and it's just dumb.  They added them to multiple streets in Houston that were basically the main back ways to go to avoid large amounts of traffic.  Shouldn't they have admitted that traffic was too bad and expanded the road instead?  Bastards are just making the environment worse by making traffic worse or causing me to use more gas.

 

On a street near my choir practice they added them.  That one is at least somewhat reasonable as it's right outside a school.  Of course, now I go on a parallel street, go far too fast, and have to turn on a much more narrow road where I've come close to incidents a few times just because of how narrow the road is.  They are now talking of putting it in on my street.  Hopefully I can talk them out of it.

 

I'm curious if it hurts my car shocks any.  Can I sue the city if they put on on my street in order to pay for new shock absorbers for the next few years.  Perhaps I'll institue the threat I've always thought of but not gotten around to implementing.  I certainly excelerate much faster out of a road hump than I normally would simply because I'm pissed that it was there.

 

Anyway, if you hear someone honk and then speed away from a road hump, you'll know it's me.

Have you ever woken up to find yourself pounding the bed in anger?  I have.  Let me tell you, it's not really that much fun.  What was I dreaming about you ask?

 

Justin and I had come back from the Bachelor's party at a casino in the middle of nowhere that night at like 1:30am.  The dream plays off of that except that he dropped me off in downtown Seattle.  For some reason, we both thought my car was there.  Justin refused to actually take me to the street with me car as it was one way and took him the wrong direction.  As such, I got out and started walking to find my car.

 

When I got to where I thought it was, I couldn't find it.  I kept trying my lock/unlock buttons to see if that would help me find the car.  Eventually I found myself on the street near the convention center where there was quite the outdoor party going on.  I heard a beeping and saw some lights ahead and thought it was my car.  It turns out it was actually a couch with lights running along the outside with a couple of people from college that I recognized but didn't remember.

 

At this point, I decided that my car must be at home and tried to call Justin back to get a ride there. He didn't answer.  I then called Maggie.  Weirdly, Maggie's phone was coming through Justin's bluetooth car system which is notorious for being incredibly noisy and hard to hear.  I could barely hear much of what she said which was frustrating to begin with.  I asked if they would come and get me and she told me that Justin was too far away at this point.  She told me that she had tried calling a bunch of other people who were closer including Jason (who isn't that close) to get me without much luck.  I was then told that X and Linda were coming to pick me up.  I asked her to repeat the names and I still couldn't hear the first one.  I asked if I knew them and she said probably not.

 

I got more and more agitated.  I defiantely hung up at one point and called them back.  I also think I sad down at one point to sleep in an alleyway with my backpack.  Once I did get them back on the phone, I started yelling to just come f-ing pick me up.  That is when I woke up while pounding the bed.  The ending is a little fuzzy about how I got to the point of sheer anger but I got there.

 

Anyway, that's my bizarre and terrible dream.  Maggie, I'm not sure why I was so mad at you but I'm sorry for yelling.  That was just not called for.  :)

I've now had my TSX for over a year now so I figure I can now make a solid comparison with my Volvo.  Here are the pros and cons for the TSX.

 

Pros:

As I promised from my previous post, I stuck the dance we did in college up on youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWTsRr2KNIk.  I believe it was originally for some sort of talent show.  We trained really hard on the last two minutes of it and just added a bunch of crap to the beginning to fill time.

 

This particular video was a requested reprisal of our dance at a dinner one night later on.  As you can probably tell, Kevin and I spent a bit of extra time learning the end part.  We were the choreographers but mostly stole the dance from the original creators.  We spent far too much time learning it.

 

Either way, I hope you enjoy and get a kick.  If you're bored by the beginning, please skip to the last two minutes as they are worth it (although you can't really see our feet).

 

 

Well, techincally Drew's was the first wedding of one of my college friends but it was so early that it doesn't really count.  He's pretty impatient and his boys are pretty good swimmers.  :)  Eddie also got married but I wasn't there so it doesn't count.

 

Anyway, I headed down to LA to hang out with Tony for a few days before the wedding.  I show up at his house and he's playing mariokart as always.  Some things never change.  Of course, it was wii kart this time so at least a little changed.  It took me quite a while to figure out the new controls and there's really no benefit or coolness you get from the wiimote for that game.

 

We went hiking and played some disc golf for old time's sake.  We went to two dodger's game.  At the first, we went early for BP and they let you out onto the dirt in center field.  They are shagging balls to keep them from you but one slipped by, rolled to the fence, and I deftly grabbed it with my hat.  Watching a game of two teams you don't care about isn't all that interesting but it was still fun.  Some guy wanted to fight us after the game.  He bumped into us on purpose and stood at the stairs for 5 minutes motioning us to come over. We were in the more expensive seats for the second game.  We sat right behind the large group of sumo wrestlers which is not something you see every day.  There's a picture of me with one of them out there somewhere.  At least 5 people in our area were tossed out of the game, there was at least one punch thrown, and a couple of racial slurs used.  Quite an interesting game.

 

We headed down to the wedding on Saturday.  I'm not sure why it was between SD and LA rather than the church the couple normally go to but the church had a great view so it wasn't so bad.  Plus we got to stop at the beach on the way to the reception (in SD) which was a lot of fun and got my thoroughly sunburned.  Given that my friend feels I'm going to hell, if he did not try to convert me at all, I'd be a bit sad that he didn't care but the amount of discussion about my hell-bound ways was a bit much to handle.  It was mentioned by the preacher twice, in the program, in pamphlets on the reception tables and mentioned by the groom.  At least I know they care.

 

As for the reception, I don't feel like I need to go to China any more.  There were ~440 people there and about 95% were Chinese, it was in a Chinese restaurant, and we had a traditional Chinese meal.  I tried a few foods I hope not to try again as I thought I was going to die if I didn't eat something.  The shark fin soup was ok, the fried scallops were decent and the jellyfish was gaggalicious.  I think I actually threw up a little in my mouth on trying that last one.  I did not try the abilony at all.  Luckily there was fried chicken near the end complete with beak so I didn't go completely hungry.  At the end of the reception, we got to do our dance from college (I'll post it on youtube soon enough) which was awesome and I wish Kevin all of the happiness in the world.

 

Since the reception ended at like 10pm, we went out to downtown SD to drink and enjoy ourselves.  We had to drink extra in honor of the groom of course.  It was sadly amusing watching Parth hit on everything that moved.  He would hit on every girl that even walked by which was just hilarious.  He was taking the approach that if it works even once, that's all that matters.  At least he had some balls which is more than I can say for Tony.  I tried playing the "have you met Tony" game and he kept running away.

 

All in all, it was an awesomely relaxing weekend.

There were people everywhere this morning.  It's like they wanted to slow me down or get hit.  There was one pulling into campus, one pulling into the driveway to the parking garage, two about 10 feet apart at the top of the parking garage and one at the bottom of the ramp in the parking garage.

 

All I have to say is WTF!  I haven't seen that many people walking in my way on one drive in ever.  All that was missing was someone at the 4-way stop sign.  If there are this many people tomorrow, I'm totally going to hit someone and teach them a lesson.  Stupid walkers getting in my way.

The most recent wedding is number four.  I believe that makes me halfway done with this wedding "season" since I think I only have June, August, November, and June '09 to go (unless I'm missing one of them which I really could be).

 

Josh and Dana got married a week or so ago.  A few of us carpooled down there so as to save the long trip downtown.  Downtown might be better for guests but is sucky for locals that are eastsiders.  We got there with plenty of time to get seats.  The ceremony was nice and short as most Jewish weddings are.  Mike caused some amusement when he showed up late (shocker there) after Josh was already up front and started waving from the back.  Twas fairly amusing and annoying simultaneously.

 

The reception lasted a pretty long time before dinner started but that gave me time to hang with some of the peeps I ran into at the bachelor's party (and get my drink on).  Dinner was amusing.  Our table was a bit ridiculous as is evidenced by the video now posted on facebook.  I got my kid's meal as I complained about not wanting the salmon.  Thanks for putting up with me and my wacky requests Dana.  :)

 

They announced the wedding party as if it were a sporting event which was hilarious (high fives while running by).  The speeches were uber short which was great.  The hora probably lasted a bit too long (Dana seemed to have had enough by the end) but I did get a chance to make Josh dizzy so success was had.

 

Then began the dancing.  This band wasn't as good as others I'd heard but they were ok.  They just played a few weirder songs I didn't like and kept having pauses between songs for whatever reason.  They played my song as always which I enjoyed.  I once again danced with a girl I didn't know but it came to nothing (yay me).  As expected, Josh's sister is super hot but far too young and his cousin was cute but likely too old (and neither actually live in seattle anyway so why do I bother). 

 

We went out for dessert afterwards in our fancy closes at dennys which was hilarious.  All in all, quite the fun and exciting weekend.  I kind of want to keep having weddings.  Something tells me my next one will be nothing like the last two.  We'll see.