Sunday, September 17, 2006
Bleagh. It’s too early for me to be writing this, but I’ve had some trouble sleeping, so I’m calling off naptime and hitting daylight. I’ll nap later if I want. I can do that now. I’m an adult!
Tool. Was. Awesome. J(5) and I got terrific seats down on the floor where we could see everything just great. The lighting and stage show was terrific, and they played so many songs! It was an absolute blast. J(5) even got me one of the concert t-shirts, which are neat because you can only get them at the actual concert. Anyway, I had a blast, and I got to see my favoritest band, like, ever, live! Swoon!
Interesting stuff before the concert that I hadn’t quite been exposed to before. J(5) and I wanted to make sure we got there in plenty of time, and we knew we were going to have to drive on freeways during rush hour, which is a dumb idea. So we ended up leaving for the concert at 5:30 just to be double-dog-gone sure we got there in plenty of time. Fortunately, though, it turns out we were doing the reverse commute, and we were able to get there in only half an hour. Unfortunately, the concert started at 8:00. Heh. So we wandered around near the staples center, running into scalpers and other concert hangers-on I’d never met before. Including guys selling ‘Tool t-shirts’ that had probably been silk-screened by the lowest bidder that very morning. Plus you *know* that the band doesn’t see any of that money, and you gots-ta support your band.
Scalpers are fun too. Just guys wandering around asking if you want some sweet tickets. J(5) explained the code to me, too. There’s guys asking if they can buy *your* tickets. They’re scalpers too, but if a cop tries to bust them, they can always say that they were asking for tickets, which isn’t scalping. Tricky!
Anniversary! J(5) and I have been dating for one whole year now. How impressive! This blows all other records completely out of the water. We went out to Buggywhip to celebrate, and had some delicious steak-based dining. That place is just so delicious!
I also flew 4 time this week, ran sprints, swam sprints, did volleyball, went to TKD, and ran a mile in 8:03, and the combined stress on my body seems to have finally taken its toll. Being on a plane that much is really not good for the system, so it would seem. Too much recycled air and shared space. The sprinting definitely helped my mile time: I did 8:30 two weeks ago and 8:12 last week. Sprinting definitely improving my running rate, but I really need to take some days off to let all the associated limbs recover.
Mmm…that’s enough for now. I’m tired.
-N
Tool. Was. Awesome. J(5) and I got terrific seats down on the floor where we could see everything just great. The lighting and stage show was terrific, and they played so many songs! It was an absolute blast. J(5) even got me one of the concert t-shirts, which are neat because you can only get them at the actual concert. Anyway, I had a blast, and I got to see my favoritest band, like, ever, live! Swoon!
Interesting stuff before the concert that I hadn’t quite been exposed to before. J(5) and I wanted to make sure we got there in plenty of time, and we knew we were going to have to drive on freeways during rush hour, which is a dumb idea. So we ended up leaving for the concert at 5:30 just to be double-dog-gone sure we got there in plenty of time. Fortunately, though, it turns out we were doing the reverse commute, and we were able to get there in only half an hour. Unfortunately, the concert started at 8:00. Heh. So we wandered around near the staples center, running into scalpers and other concert hangers-on I’d never met before. Including guys selling ‘Tool t-shirts’ that had probably been silk-screened by the lowest bidder that very morning. Plus you *know* that the band doesn’t see any of that money, and you gots-ta support your band.
Scalpers are fun too. Just guys wandering around asking if you want some sweet tickets. J(5) explained the code to me, too. There’s guys asking if they can buy *your* tickets. They’re scalpers too, but if a cop tries to bust them, they can always say that they were asking for tickets, which isn’t scalping. Tricky!
Anniversary! J(5) and I have been dating for one whole year now. How impressive! This blows all other records completely out of the water. We went out to Buggywhip to celebrate, and had some delicious steak-based dining. That place is just so delicious!
I also flew 4 time this week, ran sprints, swam sprints, did volleyball, went to TKD, and ran a mile in 8:03, and the combined stress on my body seems to have finally taken its toll. Being on a plane that much is really not good for the system, so it would seem. Too much recycled air and shared space. The sprinting definitely helped my mile time: I did 8:30 two weeks ago and 8:12 last week. Sprinting definitely improving my running rate, but I really need to take some days off to let all the associated limbs recover.
Mmm…that’s enough for now. I’m tired.
-N
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Good Grief! I am a seriously busy man!
Briefly after writing last week, I got sick. An unfortunate fever and the associated body aches, but nothing dangerous or notable. No strange fever-dreams either, which is only slightly unfortunate. While entertaining in retrospect, they can make sleeping an exhausting process. And, once again, J(5) has managed to escape my sickness uninfected. Will wonders never cease?
This last weekend, a bunch of us went hiking. The *plan* was to attempt a hike called ‘the bridge to nowhere’. It had its ups and downs. For ups, it was an incedibly pretty hike, going along a lovely river, and giving plenty of opportunities for scrambling along river-rocks. J(5) and I spent most of our time in sandles, which allowed for ease of river-crossing. Overall, it was a quite nice place to walk.
The downside was that, for a hike, it was fantastically hard to navigate. I’m not sure what kind of shoes they expect you to wear, but you are quite often forced to ford the river by foot, and so you wouldn’t want to encase your feet in hiking boots, necessarily, but afterwards you end up scrambling across these strange riverbeds with big, clunky rocks, so sandles are pretty rough going too. Luckily, J(5) and I had some pretty hearty-bottomed sandles, so that was okay with us, and two other hikers, the Chef and…um…’Android’…(a newcomer, he left raytheon for a while and is now back, until he decies he would rather be somehwere else) had nifty shoes they’d picked up at REI that had mesh sides but solid bottoms. Those worked okay, but the Chef kept having to dry her feet off, lest she risk foot-based aggrivation. And the Chef’s boyfriend, also along on the trip, brought river-walkers, which had soles too flimsy to navigate rocky paths, so every time we had to cross a river, we had to pause and let feet dry and shoes be exchanged. It made for very slow going.
Worse still, the path was extremely tricky to navigate, simply because it was extremely tricky to find. More than once we found ourselves having to cross the river back and forth only to discover that there was an alternate path on higher ground that would have taken us past the river. Not to mention that the place was ruddy with these aweful bush-plants with leaves that sharpen to a, literally, needle-sharp point. I lost a little body fluid over those buggers. Overall, quite nice, but a very, *very* tricky hike.
We ended up running into issues of water and time around the same point. The hike itself was only supposed to be 4.5 miles, which doesn’t sound like much, but, going was incredibly slow. We started around 9:45 or so (it was a bit of a drive from where we live) and at around 1:00 we realized we were still pretty far from the bride. (Besides, J(5)’s favorite part was the river-rock scrambling, she wasn’t there for the bridge). So we decided to break for lunch and turn around. We made it to the car just as we ran out of water, and we were all very, very thirsty. It had been a blazingly hot day (no sunburn, thanks sunscreen!) and dispite everyone having brought at least 2 liters of water along, we all went through all of it, and we even stopped at a drug store on the way back to buy water. J(5) and I demolished a 1.5 liter bottle between the two of us on the drive home. Tricky hike, but I think we did it just right.
Then, a couple of days after that, my birthday! Happy birthday to me! I’m officially 26 now, though I have to keep calculating my age in my head, just to be sure. J(5) got me some Alton Brown DVDs, which are awseome. I did, however, fail to send birthday lists to the rest of my family, thus proving that I am not only bad at remembering other birthdays, I’m also bad at remembering my own.
Tool concert tomorrow! So excited!
Next week, I’m flying 4 times! Crikey!
That’s it! Time to rest!
-N
Briefly after writing last week, I got sick. An unfortunate fever and the associated body aches, but nothing dangerous or notable. No strange fever-dreams either, which is only slightly unfortunate. While entertaining in retrospect, they can make sleeping an exhausting process. And, once again, J(5) has managed to escape my sickness uninfected. Will wonders never cease?
This last weekend, a bunch of us went hiking. The *plan* was to attempt a hike called ‘the bridge to nowhere’. It had its ups and downs. For ups, it was an incedibly pretty hike, going along a lovely river, and giving plenty of opportunities for scrambling along river-rocks. J(5) and I spent most of our time in sandles, which allowed for ease of river-crossing. Overall, it was a quite nice place to walk.
The downside was that, for a hike, it was fantastically hard to navigate. I’m not sure what kind of shoes they expect you to wear, but you are quite often forced to ford the river by foot, and so you wouldn’t want to encase your feet in hiking boots, necessarily, but afterwards you end up scrambling across these strange riverbeds with big, clunky rocks, so sandles are pretty rough going too. Luckily, J(5) and I had some pretty hearty-bottomed sandles, so that was okay with us, and two other hikers, the Chef and…um…’Android’…(a newcomer, he left raytheon for a while and is now back, until he decies he would rather be somehwere else) had nifty shoes they’d picked up at REI that had mesh sides but solid bottoms. Those worked okay, but the Chef kept having to dry her feet off, lest she risk foot-based aggrivation. And the Chef’s boyfriend, also along on the trip, brought river-walkers, which had soles too flimsy to navigate rocky paths, so every time we had to cross a river, we had to pause and let feet dry and shoes be exchanged. It made for very slow going.
Worse still, the path was extremely tricky to navigate, simply because it was extremely tricky to find. More than once we found ourselves having to cross the river back and forth only to discover that there was an alternate path on higher ground that would have taken us past the river. Not to mention that the place was ruddy with these aweful bush-plants with leaves that sharpen to a, literally, needle-sharp point. I lost a little body fluid over those buggers. Overall, quite nice, but a very, *very* tricky hike.
We ended up running into issues of water and time around the same point. The hike itself was only supposed to be 4.5 miles, which doesn’t sound like much, but, going was incredibly slow. We started around 9:45 or so (it was a bit of a drive from where we live) and at around 1:00 we realized we were still pretty far from the bride. (Besides, J(5)’s favorite part was the river-rock scrambling, she wasn’t there for the bridge). So we decided to break for lunch and turn around. We made it to the car just as we ran out of water, and we were all very, very thirsty. It had been a blazingly hot day (no sunburn, thanks sunscreen!) and dispite everyone having brought at least 2 liters of water along, we all went through all of it, and we even stopped at a drug store on the way back to buy water. J(5) and I demolished a 1.5 liter bottle between the two of us on the drive home. Tricky hike, but I think we did it just right.
Then, a couple of days after that, my birthday! Happy birthday to me! I’m officially 26 now, though I have to keep calculating my age in my head, just to be sure. J(5) got me some Alton Brown DVDs, which are awseome. I did, however, fail to send birthday lists to the rest of my family, thus proving that I am not only bad at remembering other birthdays, I’m also bad at remembering my own.
Tool concert tomorrow! So excited!
Next week, I’m flying 4 times! Crikey!
That’s it! Time to rest!
-N
