Looks like I missed my yearly date by a few days. Oh well.
I'm not going to take up much time right now.
Looks like Amethyst has become the #1 Xanga Rockstar now.
I don't do lots of this stuff much anymore... I am on Facebook once or twice a month. I'm on Twitter. Xanga still holds a place in my heart, though, so I come back.
I'm leaving for Korea on Monday. I'll be back in about two weeks.
This last summer was busy. I have been occupied pretty much every weekend. Not too mention I've had zero weekdays/weeknights uncommitted. Zero.
I passed my test for my 3rd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do in April. I rocked some tournament action in May. I got a dog in June. He's a German wirehaired pointer. He's named Saar. I finally got my Ducati... a 2009 Multistrada 1100 S. Rode it home on July 3rd. My boy went off to CO for school in August. Spent some quality time at the Nelson cabin in September. Now October will see me in Korea.
I'll be 300 miles away from Park and totally unable to hang out. Bummer.
I'm not here much any more. I've got too much to do to be writing logs online. However, I feel like I should post presently, if for no other reason than that I haven't in a while. I don't even know who's around on this site anymore, so I don't know if this will be read, but...
Here's a short synopsis of the time since I last posted on Xanga.
In October of 2007 I was working for the US Senate in D.C., and had been for a couple months. There was a Korean student living at my parent's house in Bismarck, one Park. I was just becoming a fan of D.C. United. Halloween showed up, and I spent it in Georgetown, where the streets are so packed that you can hardly get anywhere, and all kinds of people are causing chaos. Shortly after Halloween, I hung out with Senator Robert Byrd, and wished him a happy birthday (he was turning 90). I was there for the lighting of the Congressional Christmas tree, and I even went to a reception that was put on by the fake news syndicate of the Onion, and another that was put on by the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America. I also had a guest from England, who stuck around for a while and made things interesting.
Later in the winter I returned home, and by the end of February I was again working for the same cross-marketing company with which I had done IT work the previous summer. In March I took a break and spent time traveling around Japan, and went over to Hong Kong as well. When I got back in April, work started to become very thin, and by May I had "done everything," to quote my employer. I was "on call" until June at which point my contract expired. At the end of May, Park also left ND to return home for the summer. For the month of June I did lots of martial arts... hours of it every day, sometimes six or seven hours each day for days in a row. July 4th was as it always is, though with a much reduced turn out, since many of the original guys weren't in town anymore. I started work as an IT Tech at a less-than-truckload shipping corporation called Midwest Motor Express, where I am employed presently. A friend also came to visit me; the person with whom I traveled in Japan. All visitors to ND should see the badlands, so there we went. I spent a week of August in D.C. and it was worth every second and every cent. September started off with a canoe trip, was enhanced by a visit from another friend, this time from across the other ocean; the same friend who visited me while I was in D.C. So now it's October again, and I've completed a full year circuit.
Well, that was longer than I intended, but still quite short considering it spans a full year. I wonder if it'll be this long before I post again. Now I'm going to go read a book... it's probably more productive than this. If anybody got this far... wow. You're still on Xanga, and you have an attention span. Paul, if you are reading this... You should learn Tun Da. I think you'd 'get' the energy. Now I'm just looking for shit to add on. G'night.
Life has certainly been a whirlwind since this summer started. I got an IT consulting job for the duration of the summer, which just sustained the wealth of ambitious event-planning that I conducted.
At the end of May, I traveled to Fargo and Grand Forks for graduation weekend, then visited another good friend in Minneapolis for a day.
The middle of June saw me spending two weeks in Washington state with my "little brother," which culminated with more family than I expected coming out to see my college graduation from the Evergreen State College.
Upon my return, I immediately had the 4th of July to which I might look forward; this year, especially after last year's ban on fireworks, was amazing. Legendary even. I had another beautiful summer day filled with excitement and some of the best people I've ever known. The weekend directly following July 4th saw me in Las Vegas with one of my best friends in the world, Brian Nelson, and his brothers, as well as his girlfriend and his brother Paul's girlfriend. We were there for a couple of nights, and saw Cirque du Soleil's KA performance. It was pretty spectacular. A mere couple of weekends later saw a team of us on the Missourri river for three days and two nights, canoeing and camping out on sandbars. A couple weeks later, Warped Tour was held in Minneapolis, and a team, quite similar to the canoe team, made it's presence known at the day-long summer music festival.
The following weekend, the first in August, saw the annual Celestial Pyre, a great bonfire that has no equal... 2007's fire was the first blaze in five years to equal the legendary 2002 Pyre. The climax will even bear story-telling longer - I had a Captain from the Sheriff's department say to me: "It's impressive." In one of the final weeks of the summer, some of our crew went up to the Nelson lake cabin, and had some time to relax and have fun despite uncooperative weather. The very next weekend I was informed that we'd be hosting a Korean foreign exchange student in less than forty-eight hours. His name is Park (prounounced "bah") and he's the man. Sadly, I had only a week or so to get to know him, because my life was moving on...
The following week I found myself in Washington, D.C. The first observation that I made, within the first couple weeks working for the US Congress, was this: This country runs on twenty-somethings. Interns do a lot of work, but they are only a part of it. Interns are the beginning, in more ways than one. But it goes beyond interns... The majority of legislative assistants, coresspondents, and researchers are under thirty (many of them did, in fact, start out as interns). Those office people have the most communication with the constituents. It even goes as far as the people that suggest a particular course of action or decision for the actual policy-makers. The people that do most of the research and take the attitude of the constituents are those same twenty-somethings. Sure there are people, ususally people in the *top* positions, with fancy titles, they are almost universally older... But it's a pyramid, and the bottom 35% of a pyramid has 50% of the mass. The higher up, the less people there are, and the highest reaches cannot stand without the base. And the the bottom 45% of the governmental pyramid is twenty-somethings. Which probably accounts for around 65% of the internal guts of the U.S. government.
D.C. sort of demands that you live and learn. You can either refuse the call, or embrace it. In embracing it, I've already seen so much - And I'm not just talking about clubs and concerts (although I did see DJ Tiesto live). I've been able to see some cool festivals and art exhibits as well, including a sculpture exhibition of the work of Desidorio da Settingano, a fantastic Italian sculptor. I even got a free ticket (thanks to my buddy at National Geographic) to see a 3D Imax film about prehistoric aquatic life. And inevitably, you learn a lot about government and politics, because no matter how you feel about it, everything in D.C. is suffused with the purpose of the Feds.
Anyway, that's probably more than enough; people have got better things to do than read accounts that I have written.
Well, February sucked... alot. The month started with the death of one of my close friends from high school, an excellent guy that seemed to finally have figured out what he wanted from his life. I suppose I should be happy for him that he was able to get that figured out before he departed. My reaction to it was immediate deep sadness, though just like always I couldn't cry. I dreamed about crying, but it just doesn't happen during my waking hours. For the entire rest of the month, I would be thinking about my actions and wondering if he could see me. I would also come up short every time something reminded me of him... When you flag everything that reminds you of a person, it turns out to be a lot more things than you might at first suspect. I suppose I did have one cathartic moment... when his little brother, who I used to babysit and for whom I care deeply, described the funeral service to me. By all accounts, the service was very sad, but equally beautiful. The rest of the month saw me get into a huge feud with Parking Services that even affected Housing. The feud consisted mostly them being total douches and trying to throw the book at me, instead of trying to simply take care of things as intelligently, effeciently, and productively as possible. Not only that, but all of my S&A club's funding (as well as the funding of several other S&A clubs) got 'reallocated' without anybody being notified in advance (although apparently I'm the only club coordinator that was incensed by those actions). Finally, to top it all off, the webserver shat itself again. During crunch time for working on a Netdisco server, it just totally breaks down; we're talking virtual feces everywhere. This time my co-worker and I couldn't really fix it, and I had to rebuild it from scratch. In fact, I was lucky I could even recover our toolkit from the old server, since for some reason it thought it was running on ReiserFS (a German linux-based filesystem which is most definitely *NOT* intrinsic to Arch Linux or Debian). I think that about covers all the major stuff that essentially tore out the heart and mind of February.
On a much lighter note... March is here. Thank god for March. My little bro helped me keep my head for that last week of February, mostly just by assuring me I wasn't off my rocker. My teacher helped me put some humor in it. Allow me to share a piece of our conversation:
me: I'll be in Oly until the 16th of April or so... Then I'll be back in June for graduation. kk: you beat the odds. I owe a pimp in vegas $17 now me: Yeah? And what, exactly, were the odds? kk: 31:337 against me: Against me what, graduating? kk: nah. we all knew you'd make it out alive. zero body count was the question.
That having been said... I finished my shit and, just before leaving for California, caught the midnight showing of 300. I can honestly say I've never seen anything like it before. It was stunningly visual and fantastically compelling. It kept me going all night, and I was on my plane bright and early the next morning. Cali was cool, spend some time with my Dad's side of the family; the event was for my Aunt, so naturally all of my cousins and about half my second cousins were there. It was an all-around enjoyable time, though regrettably short.
I got back from Cali at about three or four in the afternoon, and had to finish up about three or four hours worth of work before taking off, but I was on the road that night, headed for Banff. Driving all night, and all the next day, I met up with my boys (and one girl) in the town of Banff, about an hour west of Calgary, AB in the Canadian Rockies, under the shadow of the breath-taking Mt. Rundle. Allow me to introduce you.
Mt. Rundle
We spent the night in Calgary, then went to Sunshine Village the next day, for our first day of that greatest pastime, Snow Shreddin'. The wind was blowin' something fierce that day, and we rode with it, even hiking up to the top of a mountain outside the ski-area boundary for a shot at some long, fresh tracks in untouched powder. God was it sweet. I might add that one of the coolest things about Sunshine is that the ski-out at the end of the day takes about a half hour if you start from the top. Of course we did... That night we hit the Banff hotsprings, and just lounged in the hotsprings for a good couple hours. We ate an enormous meal at Boston Pizza, then retired for the evening to drink some Sherry and slip off to sleep.
The second day saw us at beautiful Lake Louise, which is a world class resort with the god-powder, and plenty of it. A winter wonderland, if ever there was one. This place gets put in my top class of ski areas. A great place for "gladerunning" as it were (for the uninitiated, gladerunning is a type of skiing where you just pick a spot to plunge into the forest, abandoning the actual marked runs and trails totally). Additionally, Louise had some stunning bowls, some of which were simply heaped with powder, and some dizzying chutes and couloirs.
Banff Boardin Bros
Finally, we spent one more day at Sunshine Village, our last chance to mine that white gold. We were one of the first vehicles in the lot that morning, and one of the last to leave. I'd say we got in a good seven or eight hours of boarding in on that day... including some good stuff that wasn't open the first day we were there, like the fantastic terrain park, and Goat's Eye Mountain, chalked full of some phenomenally cut glade runs and enough forest and powder to keep you going for days (if you can afford it). That was the last day we could afford, so we packed it up back to Calgary.
Posted Boards at Sunshine
We spent some time just dicking around in Calgary for a while... watching movies, seeing the city a bit. We ate an enormous Chinese dinner. On our last day, right before our departure, we caught 300 in an Imax theater. That was totally amazing as well. I don't need to elaborate other than to say... bigger, clearer and louder than you've ever seen it. It was sweet.
On my way home, I called my flatmate. Our conversation went something like this:
"Hey Nate-Dawg, how was Patty's day?" "Sucked ass... I'm kinda sick." "Oh? I don't suppose you drank a Guinness for me then?" "Didn't drink any Guinness at all." "Ghey." "By the way, some drunk dude tripping acid crashed his car into our building." "WHAT!?" "Yeah, can't sleep in my room anymore, 'S not structurally sound."
So apparently, this guy was drunk, on acid, and had other "unidentifiables" (probably meth) in his system; he floored it from across the parking lot, hit a whole host of mail boxes going about seventy miles per hour (federal offense...), hydroplaned across a grassy little hill, and hit our apartment building head-on going over fifty miles an hour. The only reason the two people sleeping in the room he hit weren't killed was because they had invested in a new matress a couple of days prior and it rolled them up nicely and safely. The kid then climbed out of the driver's side window and ran around in circles taking off all his clothes, screaming "I did it!" over an over. He was sixteen years old. And that's what I had to welcome me back to Olympia. Just another sign that I need to get the hell out. Except the frogs are singing at night again, and that is a wonderful thing.
Umm... Yeah. Don't Drink and Drive... Also, no Acid or Meth, Please.
And that brings me to now. I'm back from Canada. I've got less than a month of Olympia left. In a way it kinda sucks, but in many other ways, I couldn't be happier about it. I hope the weather's nice in B-town, 'cause I wanna bust out that Excite Bike as soon as I get home.
