Kids These Days, They Move 3,000 Miles Away and Have the Audacity To Make Their Own Lives While Everyone Else Waits Patiently For Updates...

So here's the deal: It's 10/14/06, and I/we have not updated in approximately 6,000,000 light years. WE'VE BEEN BUSY, OK? So now it's Saturday, the Gators lost, and I'm drunk. I'm predicting that you've probably gone through the more recent posts that I will compose in the FUTURE and only now figure out, "Oh, THAT'S why these have been all weird and rambling and incoherent--he's effing SAUCED!" That's right--I'm messing w/ the very fabric of time right now, writing while thinking about the FUTURE while my brain is swimming in HOPS. Y'all know how we do...

Here's what's happened since last we posted: Ty moved in and then moved out, I got a job, quit, and then got another job, the summer stayed absolutely perfect, Jeff and Nazik--some of our only Seattle allies--moved away for one last year of non-localness, cadres of O'Neills invaded in two separate attacks (not to mention a near sneak-attack from the Mitchell/Melinek clan earlier), and now the fall is threatening to move in on us (tomorrow we go to REI to get rain gear and desperately prepare for wetness). Methinks the best way to catch y'all up on things is to randomly sift through pics and try to recount the last four months or so. Here we go...

The birth of our country was celebrated way back at the beginning of July, and Ryan and Chelsea were good enough to invite us to celebrate it on the shores of Lake Union. Chelsea works for a sweatshop with a beautiful view right in the middle of the city. Ty, Juli, and I were much excited and much grateful for all the free alcohol:







There were fireworks and explosions...



...and helicopters and firefighting tugboats...



...and all kinds of Seattle big-city coolness that basically smothers any previous Fourth experiences. When Juli sees stuff like this...



...she goes "OOOOOOHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOHHH!!!!!!!!!!!" and it's so high-pitched and giddy that you have to duck because satellites and dogs lose their respective bearings and might crash down into your head or chew your neck off, again respectively. Also, Juli is reminding me that there were TONS of cheddar-cheese-and-onion-chips in ready supply (see first photograph). I ate approximately two-and-one-half bags of said fatty proto-potato-product. My stomach exploded immediately afterward (images edited).

Later in the month, we saw Torben Ulrich, who Ty and I had decided was the coolest man alive based on footage from "Some Kind of Monster", the true-life reinactment of Spinal Tap by the immortal purveyors of shit metal, Metallica. Torben is Lars Ulrich's father, and in addition to being the living reincarnation of Gandalf the White, he is also a spoken-word artist, Danish tennis star, and all-around hepcat genius of the 21st century.

We were walking through Pikes Place Market...



...when Ty's eyes got as wide as dinner plates. I turned around expecting to see Sasquatch playing the mandolin on a pink camel dancing the samba in the remnants of a matchstick-replica of the Taj Mahal when I gazed upon something even better. Torben EFFING Ulrich. Dude is so kvlt and trve it makes me sick. Here you can see him wisely stroking his wizened beard, which he is wont to do whilst pondering the mysterious mysteries of meatspace and chuckling softly to himself:



So I immediately shit myself and try to run away, and Ty is all, "I HAVE to say something." I've had a long-standing rule to not approach celebrities ever since my run-in w/ Hulk Hogan in a Winn-Dixie in Clearwater w/ my friend Jason Lazaro (we were 7) and I got his autograph and then I left it in the pocket of my jeans and my Mom washed them (true story!), because what the hell are you going to say that's going to mean anything at all? So I'm all, "Dude--NO", but Ty is all, "I HAVE to," so then he goes, "You're Torben Ulrich, right?"

So Torben--being the coolest, most Zenest holmes alive--goes, "Sometimes." "SOMETIMES", ladies and gentlemen. Does he have a speechwriter for this shit or what? So anyway, Torben responds, "Sometimes" and I'm all, "No way he just said that!" (in my head), and Ty is obviously thunderstruck by Torben's cool-as-ice comment because he replies with, "I loved you in the movie!" "I LOVED...YOU IN...THE MOVIE," ladies and gentlemen. Say it out loud right now and then feel free to laugh at our sum life experience thus far.

So then Ty turns to me and immediately goes, "I just said, 'I loved you in the movie' to Torben effing Ulrich," and I'm all, "Dude, I know," and we shook our head knowingly because Torben had totally rvled us with his kvlt and trve immortality. Then Torben sprouted wings and flew away to fight a dragon or something.

More in a minute (or actually this is probably the end because you've already read what I'm about to write here in the future which is now your past and oh my god my head exploded and a phoenix flew out of it and coughed up a rainbow bridge to Atlantis Xanadu Utopia).