Go Team Pandy!

There are actually a couple other versions of these pics that I decided not to post here because they’re mainly variations on the same theme, but if you’re interested, you can check out the Gary Visits Seattle Photoset on Flickr. For larger versions, just click on the image and you’ll be taken to the Flickr version available in a variety of sizes. Also on a couple of these I used the note feature on Flickr for the first time.

Anyway, in case you couldn’t tell by the title, Yaeka and I were lucky enough to play tour guide with Gary who was out in the Puget Sound for his sister’s wedding. We did a good amount of sightseeing as well as some fine dining at Mama’s Mexican Kitchen and Frites.

Before we headed to Seattle, however, it was crucial to start our day off with some excellent root beer at XXX. This may be the biggest landmark in Issaquah, plus it’s mentioned in a Modest Mouse song. The Flickr version is normal, but I got kind of experimental here and oversaturated the background and desaturated Gary for fun.

Of course you can’t go to Seattle without getting a shot with the Space Needle. (Remember when Matt visited?)

Also in Seattle center is this huge fountain that goes through sequences along with classical music. It’s pretty cool and Yaeka and I couldn’t wait for one of those dramatic timpani hits so that the big water cannon shot would go up into the air. It actually turned out to not be as dramatic as we remembered, but these pictures still make it look a little exciting.

On the way back from Mama’s we passed by Sub Pop Records HQ. They’ve done some nice window displays since the last time I was there. Here’s Gary admiring posters for some his recent favorite albums.

Under the bridge in Fremont lives a troll. Yaeka thought it would be a great idea for Gary to pose with his head in the Troll’s nostril. If you look at her face as she walks away, she seem pretty amused that he actually did it.

To close out the night we headed over to The Garage for some happy hour priced drinks and cheap $10/hr bowling. That’s $10/hr for the lane, not for each of us! It took a while for Gary to hit his stride, but he won the second game with a score of 126. While he didn’t actually squeal like one of the middle-aged women a few lanes over after hitting a couple of strikes, I’m sure he was squealing with joy on the inside.

That’s all for now. Maybe you will be the next to get to do all of these exciting things when you visit Seattle!

I got one excellent present this year for my birthday and Yaeka actually gave it to me over 3 weeks before my birthday. I wasn’t actually expecting much, but after a quick trip to the mall I finally got some Bose speakers. They aren’t the 901s that I have been dreaming of for a while, but these 301s sound really amazing. I’ve been noticing those little details that were previously missing and now the only thing I could wish for is for neighbors that would be understanding if I felt the need to crank the stereo up. When we were going through the demo at the store these things got really really LOUD.

Here’s the old setup with my parents’ old Kenwood speakers from the 70s. They still worked pretty well, but they were definitely tired.

The unopened box posing in front of its new digs.

Here I am reading the very important documentation that comes with these sorts of things. People actually read manuals and stuff right?

Out comes speaker number one into the world.

Yaeka really wanted an old v. new demo comparison, but in the end I didn’t feel like dealing with any more speaker wire. Also, since we didn’t have a place to put the new speakers, they just had to sit there for a bit.

After a quick run to Home Depot (I actually prefer Lowe’s though), we had some new shelving that allowed for more music storage around the receiver and turntable. Here are the new speakers posing with the stereo and “A” list CDs.

So tell me, what did you get for your birthday?

Well it looks like I’m still about 6 months behind in my photo posting and also going out of chronological order, but here we go on a trip back to December 2004.

It’s pretty much a rule that when I go visit my parents back in Tennessee that I go bowling. The core group of bowlers has always been Casie, Logan, and me with a rotating cast of companions. Back in college we were frequenting a rather trashy alley during their “Cosmic Bowling” sessions that featured black lights, bad music, and a lot of trashy people getting a little too into their dirty dancing. It was an experience, but I’m glad that we have graduated to just bowling with standard lighting and juke box music. The music can be just as bad at times, but at least there isn’t an annoying DJ talking all the time.

This time out the group consisted of Logan, Casie, Jared, Keith (Casie’s fiance), Chris (Jared’s fiance at the time and now wife), and me.

Here’s Logan posing in his tough bowling pose.

When Logan is tearing up the lanes as his alter ego “Bucket of Talent”, he gets really excited!

I have a confession. He’s called “Bucket of Talent” ironically. Check out that awesome score.

Despite Logan keeping to his talented ways and Keith somehow managing to defeat Jared (Jared has actually scored 300 before), we all managed to have a good time and posed for this picture. Logan and I had to act as couple #3 so that we didn’t feel left out. Only now did I realize he was touching me inappropriately in public. From left to right: Chris, Jared, Logan, Me, Keith, Casie

We only played a couple of games since Chris and Jared were heading out of town for the actual Christmas event, but Logan, Keith, Casie, and I headed over to IHOP for some good evening eats. I think Waffle House may have provided a more fitting Tennessee experience, but hey, we’re classy people!

Speaking of IHOP, didn’t Erin go there once? Hey! It’s Erin!

Erin was heading back up to NY from Nashville so we decided to meet up in the metropolis of Knoxville. We were meeting at the mall and I was running a little late, but as I was waiting to turn left, I noticed a car pull up next to me in the wrong lane to make a left and then it was Erin so I let her make a left in front of me. Funny how things work out. Anyway, we had some good food, watched these kids play some super intense DDR (Dance Dance Revolution for you uninitiated), and check out Meet the Fockers. These kids playing DDR were simply amazing though. So amazing the arcade even had bleachers to sit and watch them. One kid displayed his suave groove playing a double version so he was moving across both the first player and second player pads while these two other kids displayed super fast moves kicking out over 200 consecutive moves without a miss! Kids! Get something else to do!

A couple of weeks ago I, along with just about everyone else I work with had what seemed to be a ridiculously bad week. Considering that the pictures below represent what I got to see and deal with within the first hour of work I should have known that things just weren’t going to go that well.

When people ask me where I work or what I do, I’m not sure they fully understand what I’m talking about when I say the company I work for does sales and warehousing for a manufacturer of irrigation/water meter boxes. I wouldn’t either if I didn’t have to deal with them every day. It still baffles my mind that pallets of these things ship out all the time. Where are they putting these things? Everywhere I go already seems to have a good supply already in the ground. Actually, I never even looked at them until I started working here and that was because it seemed like a fun game to see if the box in the ground came from the manufacturer we rep. Anyway, we rep for some other types of products as well, but this line just happens to be the one with the crappily loaded trucks.

Once again, you can click on the image for the full-sized one via Flickr.

Here’s a shot of the full scene viewed from the loading dock. If you look closely at the utility pole on the left border of the image, you’ll notice that the gray tube running next to it has a slight bend. Some drivers find it difficult to navigate into our loading dock and that bend is the result of one of those drivers.

Now a closer view from a side angle. One of the only things I was thankful for is that it wasn’t raining. Could you imagine having to help clean all this stuff up in the rain? Let me tell you, it sucks.

Here’s a shot that also shows another pallet that is ready to happily fall as soon as we pull out the gray vault box. I think we were actually able to save that one though so not all was lost.

Now this one is actually from a different day. I think some of the blame on this one could go to the driver. The pallets were probably already sideways due to a bent load bar, but his backing in wasn’t so smooth and the rough braking caused a few to slide out all over the loading dock. You can see some boxes stuck between the truck and dock in this image.

Note: This is my first photo blog post using Flickr. You should be able to click on the pictures in the blog to go to my Flickr page and check out the image in a variety of sizes.

Those of you that knew me in college may remember my rather unreliable van that I drove around. While I enjoyed driving Daisy around, I have to admit that I am happy to have a car that gets more than 12-13 mpg these days. Anyway, my parents have been having really really bad luck with cars the past few years.

First, my Dad got into an accident with our old reliable Dodge Dakota truck (I think it had around 250,000 miles on it) and it was totalled. Then when I got home for Christmas last year I found out that my mom got in an accident with the short bus. When I first saw the van, it was from the angle below. I thought to myself, “Wow, my Dad was totally exaggerating the amount of damage to the van. It just looks like some bumper damage.”

Then I got a little big closer and realized that there was some definite bumper damage.

Then I decided that I should try a different angle and thought, “Holy crap! That is some serious damage!”

The van still runs, but it is a bit drafty with the lack of rear windows. I would suggest that it would help cooling during the summer, but I found out early on that driving with the rear windows open just sucks in exhaust and leads to big headaches and nausea. The important thing though is that no one was hurt. At least that’s what my parents would say to me whenever I got into an accident. Not that I really made a habit of getting into accidents and Yaeka, no references to stupid accidents I had in high school in the comments please.

Okay, finally a post with some substance! I have a few sets of pictures to go through and organize, but this first batch is from my really super exciting New Year’s evening of activity. Yaeka and I had tossed around several ideas of things to do, but we decided none of them would be quite as cool as hanging out at Amy’s place.

We started the evening off in style thanks to Sarah’s gift to Yaeka - a collector’s edition release of Showgirls complete with a put the suction cup pasties on the stripper. Here’s Amy proudly holding up the poster with pasties in their proper place.

And now here she is showing off her award winning technique.

Doug gets tricky and turns it sideways.

Despite her technique, Amy doesn’t do to well and our eyes are burned with the viewing of such inappropriate material. Why couldn’t she just cover the nipples!

Following the exciting Showgirls game, we all thought that a game of Trivial Pursuit would really liven things up a bit. Unfortunately we were wrong and nearly everyone passed out. Here are the casualties.

Doug and Ernie were still really excited though!

Then, finally, it was time to welcome 2005. With total disregard for those lame folk passed out on the floor, he launched into an all out pots and pans assault on the ears.

And popped the cork on the champagne.

Which then hit the ceiling.

And also came out rather slushy.

All the banging of pots and pans didn’t seem to bother any of the heavy sleepers so we proceeded to play a game I learned from Brian at I Keep a Diary called Drunk Guy Jenga. Amy and Graydon show off their skillz.

Of course you shouldn’t participate in this game unless you are certain you can outlast everyone else when it comes to staying up late at night. Soon after the last round of playing Amy passed out on the stairs and became a victim of Drunk Guy Jenga.

Afterwards Graydon, Yaeka, and I headed back to the Quah to dine on a delicious dinner at the local Denny’s.

First, I’d like to inform you that we still have a shitload of candy leftover from Halloween since no kids came to our door. I just had a rather delicious Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Good thing Yaeka and I bought candy we actually liked and didn’t go all cheap with candy corn and the like.

With Halloween being on Sunday, the day for all night party action was Halloween-Eve. I woke up in a rather crappy mood that day and didn’t really want to do anything other than sleep, but some quick change of moods led us out and about trying to figure out our costumes. Yaeka decided to be a Christmas Tree and I was going to be Jack Black in the School of Rock although now that I look at these pictures I wasn’t looking very Jack Black-ish at all. I need to work on not shaving more often and getting a little crazy.

A trip to Value Village yielded this green dress made for an eight year old. I thought she was just going to cut the skirt part out, but Yaeka insisted she could make it work. In the end she just used the skirt.

After Yaeka and I got all set with our costumes, it was off to Doug and Amy’s. Here’s Doug showing off his fancy robot costume. You may have immediately thought “Tin Man”, but please note that he does not have a funnel for a hat.

Here you can see Doug holding up Amy’s “female robot” costume as well as me in my rather normal looking costume. Not very Jack Black looking that night…no wonder no one got it.

If you ever want people to notice you costume, put some boobs on it. Seems like people everywhere just had to comment on those red cup-like breasts. This and the next images were all taken at this party we went to that was giving the money to a pet shelter or something like that. The place is normally used for doggy day care I believe as there were a couple of fenced in areas and some dog toys around.

Before we ended up here, we were walking around the Capitol Hill area and experienced some interesting things. Some old folks spent their halloween sitting in a starbucks window seating area holding up cards with rankings of people passing by. That really wasn’t that exceptional. What was exceptional though was this guy walking around in camouflage with a ski mask wrapped up in this big checkerboard thing. I thought that maybe he was supposed to be a nascar flag or something. As he walked by, Doug noticed that it was linoleum. At that point the guy unrolled his linoleum, threw it on the ground and proceeded to flop on the ground (he hit concrete instead of linoleum) and breakdance quickly followed by one of his friends and then a quick rolling up of the flooring. They then took off running up the street. It was rather weird. So weird we were too stunned to take a picture.

Here’s a group pic of me, Doug, Amy, and Amy’s brother. As you can see, Yaeka wasn’t actually aware that Amy’s brother was supposed to be in the photo…that would explain why she was so annoyed with that guy with the fro trying to get in all the pictures.

Here’s the final picture of me and Yaeka. After this party we headed over to our usual bar hangout, Shorty’s, and got some pinball and erotic photo hunt games in before heading back home.

Back at the beginning of this month Yaeka and I took a day off from work to travel down to Portland and also travel up the coast on Highway 101. I had heard the drive up the coast was a nice one, but really we went that way because Yaeka wanted to visit the Tillamook Cheese Factory and I really wanted to go over the Astoria Bridge.

On our way down I-5 we passed a few landmarks. Here’s the capitol building in Olympia.

This picture is actually from a prior trip to Portland. Yaeka and I branched off I-5 to get up close to what we found out was Gospodor’s Monument. We seriously thought we were going to be abducted by a cult getting close, but found out this is the result of an eccentric millionaire named Gospodor. He had been wanting to add more monuments, but wasn’t able to get a permit because they found it to distract drivers and cause traffic.

You may have heard that Mount St. Helens had one of it’s first of the most recent string of eruptions on October 1st. Well Yaeka and I were there and left about 15 minutes before it happened. Here’s a picture of the mountain from a safe distance.

Here’s Yaeka posing by a memorial plaque to those that died in the 1980 eruption. They had a pretty nice path over this pond with a bunch of lilypads.

Well we didn’t take any pictures in Portland, but here we are watching people at Tillamook work on packaging cheese.

We have this calendar at work for a trucking company and one of the images is of their truck going over this huge bridge in Astoria. Ever since I saw it, I’ve wanted to go over this bridge. It’s a really huge long bridge that goes over the Columbia River and once we were on it, it was kind of scary.

Nearing the end of our journy on the 101, we passed through some serious Weyerhauser territory. Just tons of trees being grown for future lumber.

At the Portland Saturday market we got this catnip body pillow for the cats. They like ‘em!

Nothing to do with Portland, but Ido is sad the Red Sox got their ass kicked last night.

Well I’m only about a month after the event with these shots. These are the pics taken that I figured total strangers wouldn’t really care about. For the remaining pics from the Sasquatch Festival, check out The PhiLL(er).

The open road on the east side of the Cascade Mountains as seen through Yaeka’s windshield. The Cascades do an amazing job of keeping all the clouds and rain on the west (seattle) side of the mountains. Eastern Washington might as well be a desert.

It is hard to see fromt his picture, but if you can see the amount of chop in the water and the guy holding firmly onto his hat, you should be able to tell that it was really windy. We stopped at a gas station and the door was nearly impossible to open due to the heavy wind resistance.

Our pitiful tent. We didn’t even end up staying the night. After the concert we decided traffic wasn’t bad and took off.

The campground had these old metro buses that they used to shuttle people over to the Gorge. Here’s Yaeka looking kind of weird.

And Matt…

And me…

Before Matt left, we were sure to see the sites. This included doing the Underground Tour. Upstairs they had these cool vintage arcade games. Matt got pretty good at this shooting game, but damn do I look like a pro.

Of course if you come to Seattle you have to get the imposing vertical shot with the Space Needle. Matt looks taller than Randy Johnson!

Recently Yaeka and I made a rare trip to Seattle’s U-District where I lived during the summer of 2000. Below are a few pictures of some notable areas from my last stay in the area.

Here’s a shot inside The Seven Gables theater. This was my second time at this independent theater the first being on my first date with Yaeka to see High Fidelity. I really like the feel of the theater with its cushy red seats that rock and the painted mural that rolls up just before show time. The lighting fixtures also raise into the ceiling so as not to obstruct anyone’s view.

This time we saw Super Size Me. I think the movie was very well done. It’d be very easy to go into making such a film with a very biased view, but Morgan Spurlock (director/writer/super-sizer) goes into his experiment with a solid set of rules and a team of doctor’s to present factual data. The film isn’t a commentary on McDonald’s but one on the current trend related to American eating.

Here’s a shot of “The Ave” which actually isn’t an avenue, it’s University Way. How it got the nickname “The Ave” I don’t know, but it’s been that way for a very long time. It’s a popular place for homeless kids and street performers (aka more homeless people). Highlights of The Ave include the only remaining Cellophane Square record store (the other two have closed).

When I was looking for a paying job in Y2K, Yaeka had jokingly suggested working in a poster store. After the Experience Music Project failed to call me back quickly, I applied here and got a job. After getting this job, I went home and found a message from EMP saying I got that job as well. This equalled the summer of 80 hour work weeks as I was also interning at Sub Pop. Back in 2000 this store was actually called “Beyond the Wall” and owned by Trent Graphics, the company that does those roaming poster sales at colleges and universities like Colgate.

Most important stop of the tour was my old apartment. I sublet a room in the basement from a guy for possibly the cheapest rate to be found in Seattle at $212.