December

Nothing terribly interesting has happened as late (hence the lack of updates), but the Christmas season and accompanying travel should provide ample experience to cover here.

A quick rundown of what's been up:
1) I continue to work
2) Ohio has been unseasonably cold for this time of year. Scott and Nick are reveling in it. I am freezing my arse off.
3) My parents, brother and I have cemented plans for a downhill ski trip to happen during January.
4) We have our tickets to Costa Rica, and are planning on leaving from New York (tickets are way cheaper from New York for some reason) on the cheapest airline ever conceived by businessmen to San Jose on the 23rd of January.
5) My sweet speakers died about a week back, which is a huge bummer as they had awesome sound quality and cost quite a bit ($150). I have found a replacement, but they're super pricey ($330!) so I gotta wait to replace them.
6) Nick's brother stopped by today and we chatted about (among other things) his friend's 700hp Subaru Impreza WRX STI and how to avoid breaking transmissions.
7) Scott, Nick and I have been playing Minecraft rather obsessively. It's probably not good for us, but I almost can't control it at this point. What makes it so darn appealing? Variable interval, variable rewards. We humans are total addicts for it!

That's it for now, will update again after the holiday madness has died down. Hopefully with pictures!

Thanksgiving

Well, Turkey day came and went. We ate and stayed remarkably busy in the brisk Southeastern Ohio breezes. Here are some photo highlights:

Behold this barn we are in! Behold it!

Discussing what granite counter we're going to put in the house. Alex the granite expert renders his opinion by softly touching each sample.

Playing a friendly game of Pente together. My Dad's all like "yo dawg."

That old saying about too many cooks in the kitchen? Yeah, we don't know it either.

The thanksgiving table moments before consumption. We ate both bottles.

Becca trying to be happy (and pulling it off with relative aplomb) about the wintery weather.

We also visited with the Imhoffs, but I forgot my camera that night, and well, non DSLR-quality photos are so ... plebeian. :)

Now I'm back in Oberlin. Getting ready for a super-productive sprint to Christmas, which will be spent in Texas, Tampa, and Orlando. Carbon emissions are gonna happen. Oh yes.

In Raleigh, Updates

I'm writing to all you internet dwellers from the land of Raleigh NC. Much has happened since my last update.

First, I haven't been watching quite so many movies because I have recently become addicted to The Wire. I know, I know, I'm like 5 years late to the "oh my god the wire is so cool" party, but it's enjoyable nonetheless. Having given up on watching Fringe, it was a pleasant surprise to be greeted by a familiar face in a familiar role. Here we see Lt. Cedric Daniels of the BPD:

And here we have ... Agent Philip Broyles of the FBI:

Man, I love that face! So expressive, so distinctive, so ... unique! Anyways, watching 2 episodes of The Wire every night and then listening to Biggie Smalls, 2Pac, and Eminem all day are taking their toll. When walking about the beautiful fall streets of Oberlin I've begun shouting lines "I grew up a fuckin' screw up, got introduced to the game, got an ounce, and fuckin' blew up," or "All I want is bitches, big booty bitches, I had to sell crack so I could stack my riches!" I suspect that this trend is not for the better, so I've put a lid on it, but man, when you's got lyrics so tight that it ain't right to pack 'em all up so they don't see sunlight.

In other, non-ghetto-rap related news, I purchased a new laptop finally. I had done all the research and settled on a mid-level Asus for around $700. I went to go purchase it, and kabloomers! Sold out! I needed this for the current trip to Raleigh, so I settled for a more expensive (and higher performance) Asus G73 which has been treating me well for all of 4 days now. It's got these sweet jet exhausts in the back:

Yeah, this thing can get point five past lightspeed, and can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. As you might expect, it's monstrously heavy, the power adapter is twice the size of my netbook, and according to my brother (the physics major) it can push at least 50 megawatts through the recharging cord. It's still got one of those shiny screens (they don't sell them in matte apparently) and it doesn't have an SSD, but I suppose we can't all have nice things.

So I'm gonna be here in Raleigh for the rest of the week, then for fowl day I'm heading back to the Logan-shack to bone up on some gizzards with the rest of my familial wizards. If you are in town you should come shoot milk through your nose with me. We could also just talk or something. You know.

Watching Movies

It's been a while since I've really had time to sit down and watch movies, and it is something I've been indulging lately. In the last three weeks I've watched Anatomy of a Murder, Gladiator, Basic Instinct, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Brief Encounter, West Side Story, In Bruges, Batman Begins, The Enforcer, Army of Shadows, social network, Ninotchka, The Town, La Vita Bella, The Vanishing, and Charade. I was especially impressed by In Bruges, Army of Shadows, and The Vanishing. Charade was pretty good too, but I watched it the night after seeing the incredibly awesome "The Vanishing," so it took damage by sheer proximity to the glowing greatness of the former film. 

Nick and I set off some more thermite in the back yard, which yielded incredible photos on the D40. I'll post more about that later though, I don't feel like compressing the photos for upload. I'm getting a lot better at photography. I'm hoping to be come good enough to get great candid shots (as those are the pics I most enjoy looking at later), but it's hard operating all the controls on a DSLR in manual mode while things are happening. I'll have to get better!

Our last intern left on Friday, and he's getting prepared for his 8 month trip to Thailand (sweet!) but Scott returned from Europe earlier today, so the base is back to it's quiet efficient self. Scott was pleased that we had not destroyed the kitchen in any way.

I'm going to be buying a laptop in the next week or two, and then it's off to Becca's to try working remotely for a week or so before returning to Logan for Thanksgiving. Huzzah! 

Knifin' Around

So for those of you that don't know, Nick and I have a Trailmaster knife. We did a lot of research to determine what the sharpest blade we could afford would be and the Trailmaster won. Well, mostly, it catered to our innate immaturity with the marketing videos. Seriously, you should check out the hilarious videos on the page linked to above.

Anyways, when you have a 9 inch stainless steel bowie knife (of sorts) it's imperative that you get out there every now and again and actually slice stuff. The obvious answer is to roam about the woods doing things parents typically tell children not to do. Like smoking. And getting married too early.

Well, Sunday was one such day for Nick and I. It was a pleasant fall day, we didn't have a whole lot to do and earlier this summer we had visited an abandoned railway grade nearby that has these imminently slice-able weeds that grow about as tall as a person. They're really pulpy and fairy heavy, which makes for incredibly fun slicing. So, we decided to take a stroll and have some fun with the Trailmaster. And of course, we had to bring along our new toy: the Nikon DSLR. After all, good photos make for good memories.

At first we tried photographing the actual slicing in progress, but even at a shutter speed of 2,000 the camera just wasn't fast enough to catch our supersonic slicing attacks. We took a lot of photos and got a few good ones of the dried out weed husks exploding at the moment of bladular impact:

Upon reviewing the photos however, we realized that the best part of them wasn't the slicing, but the faces we were caught making mid-swing. So without further ado, here are the faces made when knifin' around:

We hope you found those as funny as we did. As you'll notice, our faces are rarely in focus as these were taken from larger photographic attempts to capture the knifing carnage. Just the same, look at us in all of our manly glory!

I for one think the second-to-last picture is the funniest, but Nick likes #4 from the top. Nick's Stallone impression is also pretty good.

A Trip to Chicago

Becca was visiting for her fall break last week and we took a trip to Chicago, it was pretty intense as trips go. Nine friends, four days. If we missed you this time, you should get in touch so that the next time we're road trippin' we can visit you.

On the first day (Friday), we went south and had lunch with my father on the north side of Columbus. We caught up, talked about the future of the company, and I bought two rather swanky button up shirts from the Eddie Bauer outlet for a mere $15 each. Granted, I could have purchased shirts at the salvy for $3 or $4, but they never have my size, and let's face it, Eddie Bauer is just omigosh: posh.

After the Columbus interlude, we proceeded on to Indianopolis for the evening to visit with one of Becca’s old friends. On Saturday we got up, went to a farmer’s market in the rain, took a walk, and played some board games (due to the inclement weather). We've been playing this game called Monopoly deal. It's pretty fun, and I'd recommend it if you like Monopoly but don't like it because it plays like Monopoly. The card version is very quick (say 10 minutes a round) and is more fun.

Becca’s friend was a lot of fun to chat with, but by late afternoon we had to say our goodbyes and we drove north to have dinner with the Nearing clan in Lafayette Indiana. These are our old Feast of the Hunters Moon friends, and it had been years since I had met with them, so it was really nice to catch up. They treated Becca and I to a nice meal at a rather swanky pan-Asian place in downtown Lafayette.

After dinner, we drove still farther north and met with a mutual friend from Oberlin in south Chicago. We chatted with him for a while. He is attending the divinity school at the University of Chicago and had only recently started, so we got to talk about what life was like in graduate school. He was living in a sort of Church-dormitory and there were these really cool lamps that doubled as exit signs. The writing is actually a part of the glass:

After a while, two more Oberlin friends showed up and we drove to north Chicago and spent the night with these other fellow Obies.

On Sunday, we woke up, tried to go to the Chicago Public Library (it was unfortunately closed until later in the day), so we chatted in a coffee shop about careers and life decisions and how to find work you love. Behold us in the coffee shop being REASONABLE SOCIALIZING GENTLEMEN (and women):

Then we walked around the city for 3 hours. We saw an art gallery that was fairly atrocious, had lunch at a hip burger joint (we got 10+ to our hipness as a result), and I bought my mum a gift at a gourmet tea shop. The tea shop was manned by this Asian dude that seemed to know more about tea than most people know about their spouses. He was pretty cool and talked with us about the chemistry of brewing tea. All those shelves behind him are tea samples for customers to try:

In the evening, still more Oberlin friends stopped to have dinner with us. The company was great, but we were totally exhausted, so we collapsed early.

The next day we just woke up and went back to Oberland where we resided the rest of the week doing things less dramatic. Until today of course. Nick and I went knifin' around the woods and got some great photos of us making hilarious faces. Will blog about that later. Perhaps tomorrow, time-permitting.

Football Game, Family

So this last weekend I spent the day with the family-units watching a football-based sporting event at my brother's college. As is traditional for such events, this required Alex to get dolled up like a Scotsman, kilt and all, and parade about the field. Oh, and there were some guys in helmets smashing into each other.

Nick came with me as he had never see a football game live before, and what with Scott couch surfing across Europe, there wouldn't have been much to do if he stayed at home.

I got to visit with my mum's mum and her beau Bill, and Nick and I had opportunity to play around with our newest tech acquisition: a Nikon D40 DSLR. As you can see from the photos, it produces truly amazing images. Wow. Such a step up from the point and shoot cameras I was using before!

So, here are the photos I kept (I'm being absolutely scrooge-like and only keeping 1 or 2 good shots of any given thing/person to avoid photo clutter), note that these have been pretty heavily compressed and reduced in size:

Costa Rica House

I'm not sure if I've told everyone, but Nick, Scott, and I are planning to spend part of our winter abroad in the much sunnier Costa Rica. We are all three rather tired of Northern Ohio winters with their gun metal gray trees, and gun metal gray skies, and gun metal gray buildings, and ... strangely colorful tourist videos.

Now is the time for us to escape, and we have secured our house. We will be in the country from late January through early April, and we would welcome you if you came to visit. Just remember that we will still be working, so we have to pull fairly normal schedules during the weeks.

I plan on learning some surfing while down there as the house is in Uvita, on the southwestern Pacific side of the country. Anyways, here are das photos for your viewing pleasure:















The place has 3 bedrooms and is about 10 minutes walk from the Ocean and 20 minutes walk from town. We're told we will have cellular internet, although apparently the internet just goes off to the entire country from time to time.

It's supposed to be in the mid eighties during the dry season (when we will be there) and the bugs are *supposed* to not be a problem. We'll see about that though. It's tropical, so I imagine the bugs will be a nominal problem no matter what, and there's definitely mosquito netting over top of the beds.