adam @ 404

Did a little outdoors hiking this weekend up to the top of Mt Si. You may know this mountain by another name of Twin Peaks. Check out the pics.

Seattle/mtsihike

On a whim, I took the day off on Wednesday to go skiing. It’s the last week of Spring skiing at most ski areas in washington, and we had just been getting snow in the mountains. After some hard thought, I decided life was too short to miss out on the favorable conditions and go to work to stare out the window at the snowcapped mountains.

I got out the door around 8:30 and up to Stevens Pass a bit after 10. I was surprised at how easy it was to drive up on a weekday morning. I rented some skis and was out on the slopes by 10:30. Now, I’ve never been skiing alone before for a full day. It was exhilarating though. The conditions were great, the sun was out, there was a fair amount of snow on the ground from the night before last and the mountain was virtually empty. Like I’ve recounted to everyone today that I’ve told about my outting, I got into an amazing rhythm… I would ski a run, be completely focused on what was in front of me, taking the run, get to the bottom, hop on the lift, totally zone out and think about whatever came to mind on the way up and reawaken when I saw the unloading point, only to repeat it as I traversed the mountain from front to back. I covered the entire area of Stevens, which isn’t that hard to do in a day, but I made a point of trying out all challenging slopes from any chair that offered one.

There were a couple amazing runs that I took where I traversed diagonally down the backside through trees and found some more or less light powder that were simply amazing. You could hear me yelling woohoo, and stopping only to exclaim, “This is awesome.”

The weather was such that I didn’t have to wear a cap so I ended up with a wonderful racoon sunburn around my goggles.

Seattle/stevenshooky

Someone asked me who my favorite author was recently. I told them I didn’t know. That was a lie though. My favorite author is Kurt Vonnegut. Good Night.

Spring is here in Seattle. It’s consistently in the 50s or higher and although the rain is still around, it subsides more often than not. I took advantage of a mild Saturday to head out to Discovery Park in Magnolia. It offers some of the best views of the Bay, city and Olympics mountains. Check out some of the nature photos below.

Seattle/discovery

I was looking through my monkey.org account, where some of my mail gets stuck occasionally. I found a message with my friend Kurt’s email address that had a new domain name. He got his photo site up and I’m stoked; the photos are inspiring. Please check out kurtmangumphoto.com for some nice visuals.

This is another example of a personal friend doing ever more impressive things. I’m blessed with friends doing great work - it gives someone such a godamn acute sense of pride.

Peepshow is the funniest sitcom I have seen in a long while. I rented the first season on Netflix and I can’t remember laughing so hard at my tv, well, since Grandma’s Boy (y’all know what im talking about). I may be under the influence of just having watched the first three episodes, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say its better than The Office (bbc). I’ll probably regret saying that.

It’s basically the Odd Couple first-person perspective with all the awkward scenesscenes of awkwardness of ala The Office. The two characters play off one another’s trainwrecks perfectly while they navigate or don’t navigate late-20s, early-30s single life. The extreme neurotic nature of it all appeals highly to the duty I feel toward my own highly development neurosis. Yes, I’m biased.

Has everyone else watched this already? I have a nagging feeling I just showed up to the party late.

“You will rock forevahhhhhh!”

No words could ever rock harder. During the college years, I downloaded thousands upon thousands of illegally (and legally) traded mp3s. Yes, please sue me now. I wish I was still good at that. I spent altogether too much time on #mp3indie on IRC.

There was one song that stands out now. It was a mystery single, standing alone in its remote directory. One which I have never discovered the true source. It was a band that truly rocked me to the core. I found it again recently in my collection, and it still rocks, evoking images of maidens in distress and the coolest greenest fire-breathing, electric-guitar-wielding dragons ever imagined in the history of dragons.

Who was this song performed by? The filename of the mp3 was “Port - Rock Eternal.” Port? There is no record of this band on the Internet? Rock Eternal? What is this song you speaketh ofeth?

I submit to you “Rock Eternal” performed by Port. If you know who this mystery band is, please help me illuminate.

Walking up the hill to my apartment on the way home from work, I saw a huge racoon walk out onto the sidewalk. Strangely, this is in the middle of the city, downtown during rush hour. We saw each other and stopped in our tracks. Some people in their cars found this amusing, so I flipped them and the racoon off. But not really. We managed to creep by one another on opposite sides of the sidewalk - me going up, ricky going down.

The other highlight of my day was seeing a coworker put on a beret and light up a cigarette… at the same time! Without any sense of irony!

I keep finding reasons to not go skiing. Well, my primary reason is I don’t really have anyone with whom I can go skiing. Did you see the lengths I went to in that last sentence to ensure it didn’t end in a preposition? “With whom”, I don’t even know if thats grammatically correct. You see, for one, I can go skiing alone, that’s all good, but any time I tell myself I’m going to go skiing the next day, I inevitably sleep-in. Like today, I went to bed at midnight and got up at 11:30am, talk about loving sleep and being lame. Ultimately, it didn’t matter because I couldn’t have driven up to Snoqualmie without chains on my tires today (time to get some chains).

I’ve convinced myself that if I had someone to ski with (this implies they’re a relatively good skier, *toot toot*) then I’d get up in the morning because I’d have someone waiting for me. Nonetheless, I’ve promised myself, ski buddy or no ski buddy, ski car pool or no car pool, I’m going to ski next weekend. No back country yet, don’t have the equipment or the people to do that yet, but some nice steep or bumpy terrain. “We shall overcome,” as one player on the Seahawks put it in his post-game interview. I like that complete misuse of a civil rights rallying cry.

In other news, I had a great Christmas break. I managed to get a week off (took one day to work from home) and went to Michigan. I flew into Chicago on one of the most wild flights I’ve ever been on. I sat next to a girl that insisted our row have a drinking contest with the row in front of us (she was already drunk), so that’s what we did. We even had competing male flight attendants, very chichi. The lady behind us even stood up and told us to “please be quiet, you’re not the only people on this plane you know!” That set some fireworks off, but we managed to be a bit more quiet, but the drunk girl didn’t like that at all, and even got the lady to stand up one more time as a result of semi-hushed insults thrown her way. Dang!

In Chicago, I got to see Mr. Jd Ryznar and Miles Raymer at the Empty Bottle for JDs showing of the Yacht Rock series. Good stuff. In Spring Lake/GH it was a good family time, hanging out much with the Sis, parents, grandparents, and getting my ass handed to me in Guitar Hero by my stepbrother Lukas. Saw other friends in GR and Ann Arbor as well. It was a whirlwind trip that ended back in Seattle where I went out to a couple house parties for NYE 2006. Now I’ve been back a week and finally settling back into this wildly urban lifestyle I lead, grocery shopping, sleeping-in, drinking beer and surfing the veritable Web.

Speaking of, if anyone can answer my question, please do. I’m dying to find a real bagel.

No resolutions this year, none other than keep enjoying sleep a lot.

I’m writing from deep within Seattle’s worst wind storm in millions of years. Cats and even dogs are flying past my window. Homeless people are hanging onto road signs. Trees and large construction cranes are falling all over the place. Oh crap! It’s not even funny. Really, it’s really not funny. I lied, the storm hasn’t started yet. Sorry, that wasn’t funny. Really really not funny.

I love the weather. I’m sick, too. I’ve been christmas shopping, online only. Lots of stores have lists for “The Person Who Has Everything.” This isn’t helpful for anyone. A list for “The Person Who Thinks They Have Everything, and Doesn’t Like Much At All” would be much more useful.