March 2007 Archives

I've seen this ad on the back of a bus a number of times over the last few weeks that seems to offend or confound me on every possible level. It's for some show on KIRO from noon to one, it features the name of the show (we'll get to that in a second) in cutout letters on an otherwise black backing that reveal (presumably) the show's host behind it. But the giant head is placed such that it's impossible to recognize who it is (the cut outs obscure one of his eyes, things like that). And the white that should be the backdrop is some kind of dirty white that makes it just look like the bus needs washing. But on to the name.

Kiro "Regan's Hear" noon - 1

I can interpret that name in only three possible ways, all of which suck.

1. Regans hear - that is when there many a Regan around, the collective of Regans (plural) are capable of hearing. First there's the typo (hypocritical I know), no to mention the fact that it makes no sense.
2. Regan's here - contraction of "Regan is here". Hooray! it's Regan! Who the hell is regan? I suppose I could figure it out if I could see is FACE! Again with the typo.
3. Regan's hear - Regan has some item or concept known as "hear". Regan possesses the ability to hear?

I am confounded and obviously spend way too much time thinking about this ad.

While it meant missing out on St. Patrick's day here with folks, Chicago was well worth the craptacular flight back (never has a four and a half hour long flight felt so long).

The only thing noteworthy from the first day was the Tapas bar we ate at with the screen that lied to us constantly (you are not currently seating ernesto, you haven't been seating him for the last 20 minutes) but did occasionally play music videos in spanish featuring very heavy set matadors with, as scott put it, "the flava-flav of sun glasses" (they were comically large). The food was all right.

Saturday rocked on many fronts. I won front row center tickets to see Wicked, which I'm sure used some of my built up allotment of karma, a stroll through the teaming masses of crappy green merchandise to find that Fado (who knew it was a franchise?) had a huge cover and an even bigger line starting at 8:00am to get in. So instead it we head straight to dinner at "Kevin" (you know a place is good when it's named after the chef) where I ate my fill of exotic and/or endangered animals. I got a fancy desert and the head waiter was chagrined when I asked for lemonade and they carried non so he went and made some by hand. Best. Lemonade. Ever.

And of course there was the concert with the booing to show support, where the Whiskey side TOTALLY beat out the Light side no matter what everyone else thought, and learning that Jimmy Buffet is, in fact, a bastard. My "twitchy raver-boy energy" attracted the standard fare of girls way too young for me:
Her: So what do you do?
Me: I work at a game company, at Xbox, how about you?
Her: That's so cool? I'm just about done with my junior year of my BA. Well at least this one was over 21.

The ride the the airport on the metro the next morning was interesting. Get on, hmm, 15 stops to go. At about 13 stops to go the guy who'd been asleep screams loudly in pain, doubles over, and relieves himself in several fashions. It was a long 13 stops to the airport.

My apologies to matt for the inevitable typos and homonyms in this ;)

It's "the big three-oh" for me today.. er yesterday.. and I got to celebrate in nearly every style I know how to. A good guy at work got me a cake (woot) and I chilled with some people I'd never met before and watched some of the NCAA tournament. I tried to pretend like I knew what the heck was going on, I think they bought it. That was fun.

Evening brought scrabble with scrabble friends where I lost horribly in both games but had a pretty good time doing it, as an aside, six letter words just aren't worth it. "Ovation", 12 points, woohoo. Scrabble lead to pool at the garage and a different set of friends (a few overlaps) where again I lost pretty miserably against the good people and fared okay against the equally crappy folks (yes mike, that would be you :) ). Pool lead to dancing at a club with yet a third group of friends. Still no overlap. The club was freaking awesome though because I've apparently been talked about quite frequently as I'd be introduced to someone without giving my name and they'd say "Oh, you're Birkenbuel!" which is both cool and frightening at the same time. Disconcerting would be the appropriate word I guess. Still, the reaction was generally positive so I'm going to guess I have a good reputation that somehow proceeds me. Anyway, I'm all sweaty and mostly deaf now and that's pretty much all I could hope for for a big birthday night.

Now I get to crash, wake up, frantically pack because I wasn't bright enough to have taken care of that already and then head out to the airport to head to chicago.

Viva la birthday weekend!

So this last week's "Challenge" was to go around your workspace and take pictures of things that are out of place, things that aren't where they belong. Now the book seemed to have this to mean that you would find your fine tipped brushes where your heavy oil brushes were and wouldn't that just be a catastrophe! However 1) I don't have a workspace and 2) everything is already where it's supposed to be (I think I can hear my parents laughing all the way from here). So I decided I'd have to put something someplace where it didn't belong and take pictures of that. But what? Scissors in the butter dish? Cat in the freezer? It was while wandering around Target and spotting the early easter candy that I decided: Peeps.

Peeps where they don't belong

Now technically the assignment was for 10 pictures, but I figure that since I shot 14 I should be allowed some slack to only post 9 so that they are in a nicely laid out grid. I'm all about organization and neatness after all.

Down by the dog park, a chorus of millions of frogs in the pea patch. I've never seen or heard frogs there before, they must fear the dogs. A few cars parked outside the fence, which makes sense in retrospect with the easy access to running water and sani-cans. A woman in one of the cars has a horrible cough.

In the aisles at QFC the very old and the very young are buying beer, those in the middle are buying diapers (I am there for strawberry lemonade). The cashier has a shaved head, many piercings and ink on his arms and head that he occasionally tries to hide, spicy BO. I wonder if they picked him for this shift because only the suicidal would try and rob him.

Even with the city light, after about an hour out in the dark you can see quite a lot of stars. It's frustrating that my camera can't capture what my eyes see (damn brain post-processing!).

As should be expected, the grand plans of pimping an actual radio flyer never came to be. Nor did making a miniature one, though I do have a shiny red altoid tin and a number of tiny wheels, none of which are attached in any way of course. So instead, it's the cop out "pimp my radio flyer" - the newly available model from the radio flyer website:

It was sort of fun to look through all of the images that came up on google for "radio flyer" and "red wagon" - while I wouldn't call what some people have done to their wagons "Pimping", it certainly is an impressive waste of time and resources. I'm talking fully independent drive systems for all four wheels (which are now easily off road capable). Nerds and Money are a dangerous combination.