Today some co-workers and I took a coffee break as an excuse to soak up the sunny (yet chilly) weather. I work downtown with a bunch of architects who like to wander around and look at/talk about architecture. Here are some things we saw, photos courtesy Mark.

Remember stair-falling

YEESH, WE REALLY NEED TO UPDATE THIS THING MORE...

As you'll see below in a second, I got drunk last night and decided to update the blog. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Now it's the next night, I've been hungover all day, and I'm going to compress a few months into a few paragraphs to try and get this emeffer caught up. Juli thinks we should post more often w/ fewer pictures. She's probably right, of course, but obviously not right enough to stop watching football for a few seconds and do it HERSELF. So I have to make this quick, or else I'll burn her mimosa and her omelette will get warm and then I'll get a WHUPPIN'.

Last time we left our intrepid heroes (from my P.O.V., remember--I swear I'll stop harping on the odd reverso-chronological slip n' slide of this thing soon), they were celebrating holidaze and getting trumped by the Danes. What's happened since then?

First off, Juli, Ty, and I get in a huge fight over whose turn it was to iron the antique parka collection (and in hindsight, it WAS my turn--that's my bad, guys). Ty slaps Juli across the face, and while it was funny at the time, Juli and I are forced to throw him through a window in retaliation. So he goes through our window, straight into the window of a passing taxicab, gets driven to the airport, thrown onto a plane, and calls us later from Cape Cod. Weird. Juli and I have since passed the time by trying on all of Ty's clothes and then running around the house going, "Look at me--I'm TY! DUH! My shoes and jackets are so TINY! DUH! I will be upset when I find out that my roommates have stuffed my acoustic guitar with pancakes! DUH!" I don't know why we keep doing that.

So Juli and are are back to a duo, which is good in some ways and sucks in others. One of the ways that it sucks is that now our rent is split two-ways instead of three. So we call in for backup. San Franciscans arrive in due time w/ child labor in good supply, and we set them to work immediately.

First we start Danny training for long-distance marathons...









...the operative idea here being that first-place medals are made of gold, and when gold is melted down, it eventually cools into the shape, texture, and general likeness of gold, which can then be sold for $. Associated ideas involve writing a book like, "Make Your Kids Work 4 YOU--Turn Your Toddler into a World-Class, Money-Earning Athlete in 4 Short Weeks!". The pages of this book, BTW, would be made from gold, which could of course be melted down into gold and then traded for money (or more gold, you see--I'm confident you get the picture).

Supposedly, there's also money to be had in oil, so we make the kids hang around oil machinery for a bit. Then we sit back and wait for the money to roll right in:





The money doesn't seem to want to roll right in, but Leah, being the very perceptive little girl that she is...



...looks into the water and sees all kinds of salmon:



Judging by the prices on seafood at the market, salmon is stuffed full of gold, so we rent a hovercraft, throw the kids on it, and sit back to watch the money roll right in:



Again, the money refuses to roll right in. Unfortunately, so does the hovercraft, and the kids are presumed lost at this point. T.J. and Judy, understandably upset, leave in a huff. Nevermind the fact that we blew all of our gold-medal marathon funds calling in a Blue Angels search party:



Juli and I, ever the supportive teammates of each other through thick and thin and other sundry child-losing adventures, shrug it off and go down to the market for some wine:



It's nice here, so I decide to get a job. This is a picture of me at my job, doing my job:



Verily, 'tis quite a nice job, with much grog and wenches to be had. Unfortunately, the hours 'tis not quite so nice, and so I must leave.

I am sad to go, and Juli is sad to go, so we banish our sadness with many, many episodes of Deadwood. Although Deadwood is like Shakespeare mixed w/ an N.W.A. album, I get all inspired by the cowboys coifing their facial whiskers into odd shapes and decide to have a go of it myself:



I am now a man. Men have arrangements of facial hair that provide evidence for all the beverage quaffing and lip-sneering that they have to do. My fathers have moustachios, and my father's fathers had moustachios, and cops and sailors have moustachios, and now I have moustachios, too. Also, guys that live here on Capitol Hill and hang out at The Cuff, R Place, and the Manhole all have moustachios, as well. Go figure.

One more shot of that incredible whisker sculpture for the ladies:



AWWWWWWWW, YEEEEEEEAAAAH.

The one condition of my leaving the wine bar was that I had to participate in an exit ritual, which consisted of perching precariously above a vat of acid while former co-workers and bosses fired red-hot coals at my tender flesh. Fellow members of the Grande Order of Flavor-Saver Whiskey Whisker Mustache Men be not afraid--I stepped up to the challenge with much aplomb and manly bravery:



This is my boss, Jen, looking fearsome as she wields an equally fearsome projectile:



Her aim is even more equally fearsome...



...and this is a picture of my face melting off from her successful dunking of my tender flesh into said acid vat. Good times!



Luckily, I have bionically enhanced aim, and I am not afraid to use it:



After this, Jen's top came off and things became inappropriate for our younger readers. Suffice to say, they know how to party here in the Emerald City.

So that's all the pics we have up until now, ladies and gents. I'll get pics and descriptions of our current jobs up soon, and seeing as how the rains started today and we spent way too much money on Goretex crap so that I could ride my bike through the air-ocean to get to work, maybe we'll get some outside shots, too.

Oh, and the leaves change here, too--we'll get pretty pretty of that, as well. Feel free to write in w/ any suggestions, such as, "Y'know, it would be great if JULI could write something for a change..."

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).