Quick, look over there!

For the next month or two, I invite readers of this blog (all two of you) to read Scott's blog instead, as he's been quasi-elected our Costa Rica scribe. Regular updates to this blog will begin again upon my arrival back in the states.

Cupcake Eating Competition

It all started with a bet.

Back at the beginning of December, Nick and I were sitting around the Skritter office one evening. He and his girlfriend were using this website Healthmonthly together, and Nick was picking his goals for the next 30 days. After a while, he decided that he was going to go whole hog and created a mega-list of self improvement activities for himself. It read like this:

Read a book for at least 20 minutes 3 days a week.
Walk at least 2 miles a week.
Only eat fried food 1 day a week.
Only eat white flour 2 days a week.
Meditate for 5 minutes at least 6 days a week.
Study Spanish every day.
Go to bed before 11:30pm at least 6 days a week.
Only read hacker news 1 day a week.
Study Chinese every day.
Write 3 pages in a private journal every day.
Exercise for 30 minutes at least 3 days a week.
Only eat white rice 1 day a week.
Only eat pasta 2 days a week.
Get enough Vitamin D every day.
Only eat processed food 1 day a week.
Eat raw nuts, legumes, beans, and seeds every day.
Take a multivitamin every day.
Eat greens every day.
Eat raw fruit every day.

Well, he read it to me and I promptly called bullshit. I mean, look at all that! No way could he maintain all of those goals, especially over Christmas holiday. He said he could do it though and so a bet emerged. The hows and whys of the prizes won't be discussed, but it worked out like this: if he won and completed all the goals for all thirty days without a single exception, I had to compete in a cupcake eating competition with him. If he lost, however, he had to drive up to the candy warehouse up in Cleveland buy me $40 worth of candy.

As the title suggests, he won this bet. Improbably. And so it came to be that I was implicated in the most intense eating challenge I have yet faced. Thinking ahead, Nick sensibly positioned our DSLR on the theater of operations and the following photos were created:

The initial spread. All 6 dozen of the suckers.

Scott has eaten 10 cupcakes and puts on the face to prove it.

Nick hits #10 without slowing.

Scott thinks my nausea is hilarious.

Nick puts on his attractive face for #15.

Scott glories in his fifteenth calorie cake.

I hit critical nausea levels at 15. Nick is unimpressed.

For those of you that don't know Chinese, that's Nick's 20th.

Scott finishes 2nd with 17 cakes. He hides his face in shame behind the guy fawkes mask.

Nick stuff down #25. Good god.

With Scott and I out, Nick just keeps binging. Here he contemplates his incipient fat rolls with #25.

He has suffered dearly, but his efforts yield #30.

Having long since started storing the partially digested cupcakes in his lungs, we see Nick here considering sepuku to end the nausea and shame of his accomplishment: #35.

A stunning success for Nick: 36 cupcakes, 5700 calories, and 36 hours of discomfort are all yours!

I guess we learned a valuable lesson that day: don't challenge Nick to an eating competition.

A New Year's Travel Extravaganza

Christmas and new years have come and gone and much has been done. Here's what has happened:

On the 23rd I traveled from Cleveland to San Antonio to meet Becca's mother's side of the family. Generally things were pretty chill there. I saw True Grit, which was incredible (as I predicted) and much food was consumed. Devin, Rebecca, Kelly (the cousin) and I played a game called Guillotine, which was pretty fun, and Devin and the menfolk (not including myself of course) watched a lot of football and basketball. By the end of the visit I was having trouble determining which sport was which. They all involved overly excited announcers and muscular dudes surrounded by flashy ESPN graphics. I watched a few old movies on my computer in the evening, and all was well.

From San Antonio we traveled to Tampa, and from Tampa to Orlando to visit Universal Studios. I had never been to a Theme park proper, so it was certainly a new experience. Since the only amusement park I've ever frequented is Cedar Point, I had the impression that all theme/amusement parks were essentially an excuse for the owners to build a whole lot of roller coasters. This is wrong. There is an entirely different sort of ride that exists at Theme Parks for which I was unprepared. It's sort of like a combination indoor roller coaster and movie. Universal officially calls them "experiences" not rides, which is somewhat indicative. Some of the rides I believe were engineered solely to cause motion sickness, others were really cool. I liked the Spider Man and MIB rides in particular. I think at heart though I'm a roller coaster fan, so ultimately my favorite ride at the park had to be the newest and biggest steel roller coaster. It was rad.

From Orlando we returned to Tampa where we celebrated New Years in a relaxed fashion and then I flew back to Cleveland after Rebecca's birthday on the 3rd.

Then, on the 8th, I moved out of Oberlin (totally pumped for a change) and put all my belongs into Becca's small apartment down here in Raleigh NC, where I'm going to be based for the predictable future. On Wednesday my brother, father, and I go skiing at Snowshoe in West Virginia (should be good skiing weather) and then on the 20th I head out for 10 weeks in Costa Rica with Nick and Scott via New Yawk. Whoa. So much traveling.

Unfortunately I have very little photographic evidence of all these adventures. I am coming to grips with the fact that the new Nikon D40 is a little less than optimal for situations where I'm on the go. At Orlando, for instance, I would have had to stored it in a locker on each ride (a considerable hassle) and here around NC I find that most of the photos I would like to take are indoors, and the 55mm lens on it only goes down to F4.5, so without a good flash I'm stuck taking 1" exposures which turns everything into artistic-looking blurs. I think I either need a prime lens or a nice flash. Then I can re-evaluate whether the camera is a good.

Anyways, that's a quick update, I'll write a post shortly about Nick, Scott, and my cupcake eating competition when I get some time. We have photos of that!

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!