Week Review – San Francisco

So Tuesday I drove to San Francisco, which took about 8 or 9 hours. Jammie occasionally IMed me how many miles she had left to go from Los Angeles and it almost always managed to have the same numbers of miles to go that I did. Once she arrived, we took a taxi to see the fireworks.

Looking at a map, we decided a 25 block walk back to our hotel would be nice. We forgot that San Francisco is nothing but really steep hills. We quickly found out that 25 blocks would take all night so we called a cab. Taking a cab in San Francisco is like riding a roller coaster. Which I sort of enjoyed and Jammie didn’t.

The next morning we woke up early, took back Jammie’s rental car and then picked up CountyKid. Did random stuff all over San Francisco for the rest of the day. Dropped off my car at the hotel, took a cab to China town, walked to a pier. I don’t even remember where all we went. Here’s a few pictures from when we ended up in the Crazy Caps store:

Countykid brought along about 100 fliers offering Free Cactus and explaining phonelosers.org so we started handing those out in all the tourist areas. Managed to get rid of all of them while making lots of tourists confused.

Eventually ended up back in our hotel room. While we were in Chinatown we bought 6 boxes of Pops. You know, those little white things that pop when you throw them on the ground. It was 100% Jammie’s idea to buy these just so we could throw them at people on the sidewalk from our 8th story hotel room window. She likes to pretend she’s innocent and never does anything wrong or illegal, but then she instigates stuff like this. Nate and I had lots of fun throwing Pops at the people below. We finally quit when too many people were looking up and noticing us.

As CK & I were waiting for Jammie so we could leave, we were listening to the hotel frequencies on my scanner. We heard a voice say, “We need towels sent to room #612.” I immediately called the hotel from my cell phone and asked for room 612. I told the man who answered that due to his reputation, we’d be charging him $29 per towel. He was very upset about this and asked why and I told him he KNEW why. It escalated and I finally told him I had to go because I had customers at the counter, then I hung up on him.

Soon after that we walked down 2 flights of stairs to the 6th floor so we could pass by his room and see if there was any action/fist fights. There wasn’t but we passed by the man in the hall. I said hello to him to confirm his voice and then Jammie dawdled behind to see if he went into room 612.

Dropped CK off at a bus stop on Market Street and then drove to a place called Asia SF to meet LogicBox. A friend recommended Asia SF to us, which is some kind of transvestite bar/restaurant with lip syncing shows. We spent a few hours there, catching up with LogicBox before driving him home. I hadn’t seen LogicBox since about 2000 and Jammie had never met him before. It’s always bizarre that Jammie knows ALL of my online friends, usually better than I do. Yet Jammie and I have rarely spoke to each other these past 10 years. Anyway, was great to see LogicBox again. Here’s a picture of us, along with one of the dancers looking like a mannequin.

Thursday we went to The Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, CA. It’s only of those places that claims to be built on top of a mysterious force that seems to bend time and space itself. Balls roll uphill, people lean in odd directions. It has nothing to do with the fact that the house is purposely built out of proportion and completely slants about 20 degrees. It was a fun place, though. Lots of neat optical tricks.

Next we went to a place that LogicBox recommended – The Winchester Mystery House. The tour lasted for an hour and was really interesting. This crazy old lady spent 38 years constantly adding rooms to her house to fool spirits. Must have been some really retarded spirits. Here is the story of the Winchester Mystery House. It’ll be the strangest story you read all day.

Next we crossed San Francisco for the last time, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and then visited the redwoods. Only stayed there for about 20 minutes, then attempted to find the interstate only to get lost in some very curvey mountains. Eventually found the interstate, drove for awhile and then found a Motel 6 for the night. Drove straight through the next morning and made it to my house around 3:30pm.

Yesterday I set up a photo album program on my website. It contains all of our San Francisco pictures. I’m probably going to start dumping all of my photos into it.

Yesterday we attempted to go blueberry picking in Corvallis. It’s the 3rd time we’ve tried this year and they’re always closed for some reason. So it’s Saturday at 4pm and they must be open, right? Nope. The guy told us to come back on Monday. As we drove away, I rolled down my window and grabbed a handful of blueberrys. Then we went to another place and picked tons of raspberries. And Jammie was able to at least BUY some blueberries at that place.

Last Monday I put out a new Big Beef Bueno. Go listen!

Problem Child

Jammie & me & the kids watched both of the old Problem Child movies today and yesterday. Anyone remember those, from the very early 1990’s? Then we started looking up the actors that played Junior & Trixie. (Trixie was the problem child girl from the 2nd movie) Not only do they both have Myspace pages, but they’re on each other’s Top 8 lists. AND they’re staring in a new movie together soon. First movie Trixie has done since her Problem Child movie.

Junior: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=6179796

Trixie: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=33262853

Driving to San Francisco

Woke up at 6:30am because of rain pounding on the window. Was a little surprised since I didn’t remember rain being in the forecast this week. I got up to start packing for my trip to San Francisco and the downpour continued. Then I got a surprise – thunder and lighting. Not wimpy thunder, either. Super loud, house-shaking thunder. It ruled. In my 2 – 3 total years of living in Oregon, I’ve never heard a thunderstorm here. I seriously didn’t think they existed here. Soon after that it started hailing and the power went out 3 times.

I got everything packed and was on the road by 7:30am. And I was quite disappointed to find the donut shop closed. I had to settle for some gas station powdered donuts. The trip was uneventful and traffic was light until I got into San Francisco. There was a wreck I had to maneuver around right before I crossed a large bridge. After that, about 5 motorcyclers flew past me going way too fast. Just a minute later one of them got into an accident ahead of me along with 3 other cars. I passed right next to the motorcycle and it was really fucked up.

I continue on, past the wreckage and I see the other 4 motorcyclers stopped in the left lane, looking back. Finally they decide to just wrong way on the bridge to get back to their friend. So they all pass me going in the wrong direction. Guess I can’t blame them, though.

Made it into San Francisco and found the hotel easily enough. I can’t check in until Jammie gets here and I think she’s still a few hours away from here, driving up from L.A. I took a walk around the neighborhood for awhile, ate at a diner and now I’m in the hotel’s lobby, catching up on emails and LJ.

Our current state of Legos…

A week or 2 ago an atomic bomb, combined with giant killer robots, exploded the Lego town we’d had for at least 6 months. So last week we started rebuilding. I did most of the exterior of the buildings and Emily did most of their furnishings. Below are pictures that I took this evening.

Lego TownLego TownLego Town

Lego TownLego TownLego Town

Lego TownLego TownLego Town

Lego TownLego TownLego Town

Sun dial

It’s been in the 70’s for weeks now. We haven’t really had any hot weather at all this year. Until yesterday – it finally got in the 90’s. Today it’s 100 out which is the forecast for most of this week. Kids & I went to the Corvallis pool yesterday. Had to stand in line to get in for 30 minutes. Their pool kicked ass and was cheap. Only $10.25 for all of us. But they closed at 4pm. WTF is up with that?

Not a whole lot else going on this week. Got the kids hooked on Daria since I downloaded 5 seasons of that. Stayed inside all day today except for a quick lunch at Wendy’s. Thank God for central air. When I was looking for a place to live 8 or 9 months ago I couldn’t decide between washer and dryer hookups, a free outdoor pool or central air. I’m very happy I picked this one.

Yesterday as I was outside checking the mail, something made me decide that turning the big lamp post outside our door into a giant sun dial would be a great idea! I don’t know why. So I explained to Emily how a sun dial works and she immediately began marking the hours for most of yesterday. Then today we filled in all the blanks that we missed from swimming and this morning. Here’s a couple pictures of the completed timepiece:

It’s hard to see in my shrunken pictures, but the numbers go all the way out onto the curb and into the street a little. Luckily the dirt side of the clock is all night time so that part doesn’t matter. There is no rain in the forecast for at least 5 days. So people walking down our heavily trafficked sidewalk will be able to enjoy our work for at least the next week.

Website updates

I got 11th place in a photoshop contest, revamped the commenting system on phonelosers.org (for the 3rd time in a year now, this time completely in PHP), revamped Old People Are Funny and added some forums to it (some podcast plans to feature it on their show sometime this week), released another Big Beef Bueno, got #2 in Mahjong, and then #1. I didn’t even play much today, I just happened to have a couple of good games.

Also, Delta Park Project played another of my voicemails. It’s on the last 20 seconds of this show. But the show is a “best of” show and both of my other 2 voicemails are also thrown into that show. So apparently I’ve done some of the best parts of a show that’s up to it’s 83rd episode.

Library books

Went to the library the other day with the kids and ended up finding Mark Twain’s Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays. There’s 2 volumes of it so I just picked up the first one for now. Great stuff!

Speaking of libraries…around 1992 I had checked out a book called Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman. Before I got around to returning it, I looted a 7-Eleven and attempted to flee the state. Somehow this resulted in me never returning the book. When I moved back to the Alton area in 1997, I went to check out a book and they said, “It looks like you never returned Steal This Book” which sounded pretty damn funny. Somehow they let me continue using my library account for the next 8 years without paying for Abbie Hoffman’s book.

Thinking this was a great opportunity for a prank phone call, I called up that library yesterday to check on the status of my account. I was waiting for them to tell me that I’d never returned Steal This Book so I could make a bunch of obvious jokes at them. But nobody I talked to could find any reference to it on my account. I called up several other libraries in the district, since they all had access to my account, but none of them found anything about the stolen book. I guess they just don’t care about a book that I didn’t return 14 years ago.

What was great was that a few years ago I checked that library’s catalog for that book. Right next to the title of Steal This Book it showed the current status of the book. Which was, “Presumed lost/stolen.”

And speaking of library antics! Also back in 1991 or so, Chris Tomkinson and I discovered how incredibly easy it was to get a library card with minimal identification. At the time you didn’t even need picture ID. Just something with your name on it, such as a utility bill. And utility bills were easy to forge. So we starting getting library cards and stealing tons of books. Well, I make the fake utility bills and applied for the accounts. Chris was always too much of a wuss to do any of the dirty work himself. He was just there to reap the benefits.

The maximum you could check out in 1 visit was 8 books. But all the libraries in our district were connected which meant we could check out 8 books from each branch. We had about 7 or 8 branches within driving distance, so that was at least 56 books per fake utility bill we printed up. We spent many evenings driving to every library we could, piling up books in the back of Chris’ car.

The method I used to fake a utility bill was quite primative at the time – I took a real utility bill, applied a light coat of whiteout over the important bits of information, then used my brother’s typewriter to type in new information. Neither of our dot matrix printers would have done that good of a job. The only time this method failed was in the Edwardsville library, when the librarian noticed something odd about the print on the bill. She held it up to the light and could clearly make out the real name and phone number information underneath. I can’t remember how I responded to that, but I know we didn’t get a card that time.

Right around 2001, 10 years later, I decided to return most of my stolen books. Many of them I’d never even bothered to read and they just took up space on my bookshelves which could be going to books that were actually useful to me. So I drove to the East Alton library late one night and dropped a few dozen books into the book deposit. Most of them still had their identifying numbers on them and the stamped card inside, showing the date in 1991 that they were due. I bet the librarians were surprised. If they only knew that many of those books accompanied me as I criss-crossed the country several times in the early to mid 90’s.

Weekend

Friday I was thinking about going to 2600. I’ve only been there once since I moved to this area and it was incredibly boring when I went. But instead I fell asleep watching Knight Rider.

Saturday was my day of good deeds. I was riding aimlessly around Albany and some lady yells “hi!” from her yard. She ended up wanting me to help her start her lawn mower which I managed to do. Then later my aimlessness took me to the skateboard park where some teen approached me and asked if he could borrow my bike to go home and get his shoes. I said sure and took his skateboard as collateral. Had Wendy’s for lunch. Wandered around the mall at some point. Played video games. Hung out in the book store for a long time.

Sunday I spent pretty much all day putting together a new PLA Radio. Throughout the weekend I obsessively played Mahjong on Cal’s for hours at a time. This is all Jammie’s fault for getting me addicted. But at least I’m the champ of it. Oh shit, I just opened up Mahjong so that I could link to that. Now I have to go play it.

Emily TP promo

Emily was on the Twisted Pickle show this morning for her promo. Click here to listen and forward to about 4 minutes 25 seconds.

I was going to do a promo for Corby but Emily won’t let me cause she doesn’t want the competition. So I made one for Nate and Di instead.

Oddly enough, the very morning after Emily submitted her promo last week, I got this email from Corby:

Sup Brad, how are things? Just got a great submission
for my recently posted contest but I think they
sent it to the wrong address. I think this actually
goes to you…

Attached was a promo for PLA radio which can be heard on this page. It’s the #5 promo by Evan.

In other news, yesterday was really exciting because I installed a ceiling fan in my office.

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