Two times twelve is twenty-four, here’s to several dozen more!

Here’s to yet another year of whiskey, jagermeister, and beer!

Wooo! Tonight (Tuesday night) was awesome. Although only two people out-of-state even remembered what was happening (I’m kinda disappointed, though not surprised), I had a great time with my local homies here even though I did horrible at poker. I’m okay with it though. I did decent at pool playing and had some halfway decent conversation. Not a bad time at all.

Oh, and I came up with those toasts myself. Feel free to borrow them, or not, depending on the circumstances of your life and ability to use them.

Categories: Life

It’s frigging cold. This is Alaska cold w/o the arctic tundra and aurora borealis to make it almost worthwhile. Tonight it got down to eleven degrees below zero (fahrenheit). I’m sitting in my apartment shivering right now due to drafty doors and windows. I’m cooking some ramen to warm my soul. Honestly, I should be going to bed right about now, but I’ve been doing some podcasting research and I still need food. Speaking of food: a watched pot never boils, but an unwatched pot burns the house down. So I’ll intermitently go watch the pot and prevent the place from burning.

Categories: Life

It’s snowing today. Well, actually, it’s been snowing since yesterday and has continued into today. The days get all confusing when you work weird hours.

I’m enjoying the whiteness as this is the first big snowfall that’s actually hit the cities where I live and work. I had to drive slow and even got the opportunity to slide around a little on the road. I like sliding a little so long as I feel I’m in control of it. At one point I wasn’t so I freaked a little, but my four-cylinder beauty can handle the madness!

It’s less than three weeks till I go to Guatemala for ten days. It’s snuck up so fast I’m not even sure how many of you I’ve told about it. It’s from March 4 to March 13. My parents’ church is sponsoring the trip to a village in Guatemala called “Trapachitos.” Trapachitos is a village sponsored by Agros International. Anyway, we’ll be chilling w/ visitors, building stuff, doing activities with the kids, and other stuff. We’ll also see a couple more-modern cities in Guatemala when we’re on the way from the airport to the village.

Anyway, if you want to be updated about the trip when I’m there, let me know by sending me an email or leaving a comment.

Categories: Life

My buddy Walter has a brief message about his new site:

Hey, folks! My name is Walter, and I just started up a new podcast (audio show for download) called Just An Alias. Basically, it’s a podcast featuring all kinds of rocking music that falls somewhere in the punk/indie/emo genres. If you’re into this kind of stuff at all, please check it out and throw up a link from your websites or blogs. Thanks for the love! — Walter

It’s hella good stuff and I hope to see this thing take off for him.

Categories: Music

“Hear me, my people: love is out there, but it’s not for you. Be happy that there’s nobody in your life to love and instead do the best you can to make your homies — your brothers and sisters — feel better about themselves not being in love either. Except for the ones that are, but you should probably give them their space today.”

I am all about the black coffee today. More likely, I’ll just do a couple straight shots of whiskey tonight and pretend I don’t care about anything.

All I really want is love, cafe mocha, and some of that 100% fruit-from-concentrate juice. But instead of wining and dining and smooth-talking my way through a romantic evening, I’ll be eating nachos, drinking beer, and playing poker tonight with a bunch of other singles, divorcees, or unhappily-married people. I’m okay with this except for the whole “I’m-lonely-as-hell” meme running through my life right now.

So I buy a lot of punk (or whatever emo/screamo title you want to drape over most of the genre at the present time) for the moments when I want to rock the sadness, and some decent indie bands for the more reflective sadness. No happy songs today. I bought Matchbook Romance’s debut album a couple days ago, but their new album comes out today so I might buy that. Or I might buy a better website. I don’t know. I want to get this podcast thing going.

But my music talk probably bores some of you. Let’s bring this back to reality. Oh, I know: random encounters of the awesome kind.

I ran into Nick at Starbucks yesterday. For a while, we went to the same church and he’s maybe a couple years younger than me. He’s a cool guy w/ a bit of a dark streak, but everybody’s got one of those whether it’s lived out or just emotional sickness. We’ve played a couple poker games together and whatnot, and he’s also friends with a guy I worked with at my last job (the photo place that’s since gotten rid of the mouse-infested machine and, incidentally, all the employees who worked with the mouse). So we talked for a couple minutes about things, he gave me Ben’s new phone number, and invited me to this Christian-group for twentysomethings in my town on Sunday nights. How tight is that? It’s casual, it’s kids my age, it fits my schedule, and it’s exactly what I’m looking for.

The whole reason I ran into Nick is that I was hanging out with my friend Mark. We had a good time last night. He shared some crazy stores from his experiences overseas, we both talked about what’s going on in our lives, watched a bloody vampire/werewolf movie (Underworld: Evolution — not for the faint of heart), and just chilled.

I really ought to be getting to sleep now, but it’ll probably be a couple more hours. That’s alright though ’cause I don’t have to be to the bar till seven tonight.

Categories: Life