We're going camping

This Labor Day weekend, my family and I are going camping. Right now, even as we speak, Rachel is stressing about what to bring, and what to leave behind. What is the weather going to be like, ad can we trust the local forecast? What make it doubly hard is that she is packing for both herself and Ammon. This will be his first camping trip, and she isn't sure what to bring for him. She wants him to have everything he needs so he wont be too hot during the day or too cold at night, but then again there's the problem of trusting the weather reports. We can't bring everything... For women, this seems to be one of the great struggles in life, "What To Pack?" For me, not so hard. We're gonna be gone three days. So A pair of jeans, plenty of clean underwear and socks, three t-shirts, my fleece sweatshirt and a light jacket. And some shorts. And my swim trunks. And...
Yeah, two hours later and we are still packing. Any questions?

Mowing the Lawn

Today I am supposed to mow the lawn. I'm not a big fan of lawn mowing in general. It's not that I hate it per say, but it's the fact that I have to do it every week or else I'll regret it. That and pruning the photinia hedge that I have. I just don't like the fact that I HAVE to do it. But if I don't, then it ends up being even more difficult and taking even more time and then I like it even less. For instance, I have mowed my front lawn (the one everyone can see) each week. I have not, on theother hand mowed my backyard for about three weeks now and the grass back there is about a foot and a half high. So now I have my work cut out for me. Get it? CUT out for me? No? Whatever. It would help if I got some award or something at the end of mowing the lawn, but nooooo, all I get is the satisfaction of knowing that I'm gonna have to do it all over again next week. And the week after, and the week after that too. And that's not really much of an award is it? In fact, it's more like punishment for having a lawn in the first place. You have to mow it and water it and fertilize it to make it look nice. What a waste. I think my neighbors have it right: rip up the lawn and make the whole space into a flower bed. Put in a few bushes and some flowers and cover the rest with landscaping fabric and beauty bark and forget about it. I'll never do that though because I like grass....

Our 6th Anniversary

So yesterday Rachel and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary. The day was spent with both of us at work. Sounds like fun, huh? Anyway, it was a stressful day for her mostly because her boss couldn't let her off as early as she thought he was going to. Apparently he had a bunch of work to do and Rachel had to stay to man the floor. But he could have been nicer about it... It was fine in the end though, because our dinner reservations were not until 8:30pm. So Rachel came to pick me up for work and we went into Downtown Seattle, sort of on a scavenger hunt to find as many of the fiberglass pigs as we could before dinner. Sounds weird, I know, but it was something to do. We drove aimlessly throughout the city both looking for the big pigs on the sidewalks and in the plazas. We did find quite a few of them, about 20 I think. But while we were looking for the pigs, Rachel turned into Pike Place Market, because we knew there were some there, and everything was closed up cause it was about 7:30pm and the shops close by ten. What was interesting was the crowd of people standing around the big garbage bins though. There was this huge group of people milling around, and it looked like they were digging through the bins for something, so Rachel wanted to know what they were looking for. She stopped the car and got out and saw that the crowd was digging for flowers. In the Market, there are many fresh flower vendors and at the end of the day, they dump their leftovers into the garbage, some of them still in pretty good shape. So Rachel got in and started looking. She got a pretty good bouquet after a while. I took video, I thought it was pretty funny, myself.

Anyway after that, we headed to the restaurant where we were going to eat. Rachel wanted steak, and what better place to get good steak than Ruth's Chris Steakhouse? (Thank you Sean Hannity!) I had specified on the reservation that it was our anniversary, and they didn't disappoint: they gave us our own table away from everyone else, put little sparkles on it that said "Happy Anniversary!" and all that good stuff. Rachel was pretty happy about it. The waitress was very good, and made good suggestions and we had a very enjoyable dinner. We split a lobster bisque, a house salad, garlic mashed potatoes and broccoli au gratin. We each got our own steaks, Rachel had a ribeye and I had a t-bone. Bar none, the best steaks I have ever had. And for those of you who go, splitting all the sides is the way to go, that way you don't get too full for the best part: the steak! I like that place because everything is ordered separately, you can get exactly the meal you want, kind of ala carte. It makes for a very nice experience overall. I was very pleased with the quality of the food and the service. But be prepared to drop $100 per person!

I don't know

Ever since I have started this blog, I have been getting more and more interested in what I can do to reach out online. For instance, I have installed Hamachi, which lets me create a virtual LAN over the internet. Now I can play games like Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne with my brothers and some of my friends without actually having to be there. Kind of nice if your brothers and friends live in different states and don't get together very often. It also allows us to share files and pictures without e-mail and chat without AIM or any of those other programs that eat up processor time. If I want to I can reach out and put a new picture right into the shared files folder on one of the other computers in my virtual network and they don't have to do anything except click and open the file. And I can print to the other printers in the network too. Kind of cool.
Also I made a MySpace page a while back but never did anything with it, and recently I went back and updated that page, mostly to herd people back here though. But it is another way to connect with people.
Then today, I got an invite from someone to be a friend on their Facebook account, so I made a Facebook page and joined that too. I can apparently upload as many pictures as I want to that site, so that's kind of cool too.
But just so you all know, I will be spending most of my time here blogging. I will visit these other sites occasionally, but this is the one that I am most interested in and the one I will update most frequently. So check back often and if you haven't already done so, join my Frappr Map and give me a shout out. Just click where it says "Please Add Yourself." Upload a picture and say Hi. You don't have to sign up for anything...