Just Plain Chips

How does this always happen? I still haven’t finished talking about the great time I had playing hockey and meeting up with Cari again last weekend. I suppose I better talk about this weekend before I get even further behind.

I’ll work backwards. For Monday I had been looking forward to seeing Revenge of the Sith again, but it was too nice out to go to a movie. We washed our cars, grilled out for dinner, played some football at the park, went out for ice cream, and had a late breakfast. Brian and I had a late breakfast because we didn’t wake up until about 10am and didn’t get home until about 11:45am.

The reason we got up so late was because we had been out the night before to see Porcupine Tree at the Fine Line. The short review is that the show was awesome. The only bad thing was that the show was short. They came on at about 9pm and were done by 10:45. Sure, we only paid $17 for tickets, but it went way too fast.

Brian and I picked up our childhood friend Jessie at the BBQ party at our house that day. She wasn’t doing anything that night and hadn’t seen Brian in a while so she decided to come with us. We left the party about 6pm and headed to Jessie’s place in downtown Minneapolis. After parking there and sipping a drink, Brian had Jameson on the rocks, and Jessie and I each had a Jameson with Coke. We then walked the short 7 blocks to the Fine Line and Jessie bought a ticket. A man outside sold Jessie a ticket for $18, $2 cheaper than the door price. She handed him a 20 and he then became confused about how “giving change” works and attempted to ask for a couple extra dollars. Luckily Brian straightened him out and we were good to go.
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Some birds have flown into the shop here at work. I was walking back into the shop from loading some cabinets into the truck when I heard some of their calls from above. I looked straight up to find them for a few seconds before deciding that it probably wasn’t the best idea. I looked back down and just walked back to my desk.

I went to drop Brian off at the airport for his 9:20 flight this morning. I was just turning back onto 494 when I got a call from Brian. Oops. His flight is at 9:20pm. So I got off on the next exit and headed back and picked him up. He’s a little annoyed this morning. So we’re going to go pick up some cabinets. Hooray!

Remember yesterday when I ate too much for lunch? Well, it happened again. I headed out to Arby’s to partake in the 5 regular roast beef sandwiches for $5.95. I came back and ate two pretty quickly. Well, that wasn’t quite enough so I had another. For some stupid reason I scarfed that third one down way too fast and am still feeling it. Dang food.

Your dreary existance aboard the flights of Northwest Airlines is about to get worse. They took away meal service a bit ago and now they’re not even going to serve pretzels. I can understand why they’d need to cut some costs but I’m not sure that’s their biggest problem.

I’m pretty sure that they aren’t doing well because their service is just not good. No one I know likes flying on Northwest. Really the only reason I always do is because Minneapolis is a Northwest hub.

Oh well, at least I don’t fly too often.

Have you ever been to Macchu Picchu? Do you know anyone who has? Pretty soon I will have known two people who have done it. And I dated both of them. One was actually born in Lima, Peru and had been up there in her youth. Another is going to be there this weekend because she’s a crazy adventurer lady.

I’ve had some pretty cool girlfriends in my life.

I am still stuffed from a late lunch. My dad, brother Brian, and I went to Vescio’s for lunch today. The owner, Mr. Vescio, is an old family friend. He sat down with us for most of the time as we discussed the big party we’re having there this weekend. We of course started with tasty bread and a huge antipasta salad. Then Fred brought us out some deep fried ravioli to taste and then our meals came out. Both Brian and I had our old favorite, meat filled ravioli, though we had both alfredo and meat sauce on top. After dinner we managed to squeeze down some cheese cake. I nearly fell right asleep after getting back to the office. I won’t need to eat anything for dinner until about 8.

In case you missed it last time–and you should be bummed if you did–the WB is re-airing “Mobile Home Disaster” Thursday, May 25th, at 8pm CST. So check it out. As you can see I think it actually turned out pretty good. If you like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition for the right reasons, you’ll like this show, too. My brother Brian did all of the graphics, transitions, and effects. The opening montage is pretty amazing to me, he said that it took quite some time to render. You can even see his name in the credits for a split second at the end.

Anyway, watch it!

I’m glad I don’t have the same route to drive to work as I used to. If I had been driving 494 to work this morning I might have been annoyed with the fact that a tanker had crashed and broken open spilling pesticide everywhere. That wouldn’t have been a fun ride no matter how I would have gotten to work. Luckily my 20 minute ride down through mostly residential areas went smoothly.

Brian flew in on the red eye last night/this morning. They offered a cheap upgrade to first class so he upgraded with the idea that he would be able to sleep a little better in 1st class than in coach.

Well, the plan didn’t work out exactly as planned. He wasn’t able to sleep very much. I’m suspecting the main reason was so that he could stay awake to drink all the Jack and Cokes the attendant kept bringing him. He was in a pretty happy mood at 8am for having flown for 4 hours that morning.

Shhh, don’t tell him I wrote this, he might get embarrassed.

This is insane. Apparently a guy posted an entry to his blog about some one he knew that stopped by his apartment–just before the visitor murdered him! Chilling.

This is a continuation of the story started here.

Alright, after the fun ride into town Tim and I met Cari in the hotel and we all just kind of hung out at the hotel for a while before our first game. We finally left for the rink and we were about the first ones there from our team. We signed in and were handed our jerseys. Tim asked if they happened to have number 9 since that’s what he had worn before. They got him his 9 and I asked “While you’re at it, do you have number 7?”, so I got my number as well. Cari considered getting number 8 to make us a consecutive trio, but she stuck with number 6.

The team was quite an interesting collection of guys. There were a few from Detroit and a few from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (the UP). After a little getting to know each other banter (but not all that much) we headed out to the ice. I was a little nervous about getting out there. Some of the guys on our team were pretty good and had played much higher levels of hockey throughout their youths–not to mention they were much closer to their youths than I am. But once we got out there, I was back on defense, I felt pretty comfortable. No one out there was so good that I felt I didn’t belong on the same ice.

The first game was a really close one. We won 3-2. I was +2 with a couple of shots. I didn’t allow a goal while I was on the ice, which is my main goal as a defenseman, so I was pretty happy with my performance.

I wish I could write more but that’s all I have in me for tonight. I tell you–something comes up every night. I wanted to go on a run and write some tonight but I had to go through a bunch of my stuff to pick out things to go to Matt and Jenny’s garage sale this weekend. Oh well, until later. Hopefully I’ll get to write tomorrow. Brian is coming into town. We were going to see Kasabian at the Fine Line but it’s been frickin’ cancelled! I’m not too happy about that.

Alright, I finally have the internet at home so I thought I’d actually write something while relaxing a little bit tonight.

So this weekend really started on Thursday night when Steve and I went to see Revenge of the Sith, but I’ll talk about that at a later date. One thing that I found out today that I thought was pretty interesting is that the first four days of the movie being out are all in the top 15 single grossing days of all time, with the opening day being the biggest opening day and biggest single day ever. Crazy Star Wars fans. Though it helped that it was actually a good movie.

Anyway, after the movie I came home to gather some of the stuff I’d need to be taking to Chicago. I left the house the next morning at about 7:30am. Luckily the traffic wasn’t bad all the way around the Cities. I got over to Inver Grove Heights to pick up Tim without any problem. The only problem was that Tim was about 30 minutes late to our meeting spot. I found out later it was because he had been out boozing the night before, so it was understandable.

The drive down actually went pretty quickly. The drive to Tim’s parent’s house near Milwaukee took 4-5 hours. We hadn’t seen each other in more than 5 years so we were able to pretty much talk the entire way down. We got to his parent’s house where we had a bite to eat and also grabbed his hockey equipment. Before leaving town, though, we headed to the hockey shop he frequented his whole life to get our skates sharpened…for free. So that wasn’t too bad.

Oh, I almost forgot. Somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin we attracted the attention of a snaggle toothed hitchhiker. He said he was in town from Milwaukee for a child support hearing and his car had been towed and the child support hearing had only lasted 15 minutes and now he needed a ride towards Milwaukee or some money for a bus ticket. Unfortunately we just didn’t have any room in the car for him. Hopefully he was able to get back home.

Finally we headed out and toward Chicago. We were almost to the hotel–just getting off the tollway when I accidentally went into the IPass lane. The IPass is an electronic device they have for the tollways in Chicago. People put money on them like a debit card and they don’t have to stop at the tolls–the money gets automatically deducted when they pass through. Needless to say, I don’t have an IPass. I had my 50 cents out and everything, but had no where to throw it, I started backing up but some cars came so I just drove through. I hope they don’t send me a ticket.

The worst traffic of the whole trip was on the two roads leading to the hotel. It took us maybe 20 minutes to go maybe 3 miles.

I’ll tell you about the first night next time–for now, I need some sleep.

Just a quick note before I turn in for the night. I had a great weekend playing hockey and seeing a couple of old friends. I had four games this weekend and my body almost didn’t make it. My back is a mess of knots. I had tons of fun though. The competition was much higher than I’m used to but I kept pace really well and even had a couple of goals. The defensemen I burned today on my way to a goal supposedly played for the Vancouver Canucks of the NHL. So that was fun.

Anyway, a great time was had by all, but I need my rest, I’m hurting bad.

You may or may not have noticed a couple of new sections on my side bar. There are two of them: “Books I’m Reading” and “Books that are Next”. The section titles should be self explanatory. Though I wouldn’t guarantee that the books that are “next” will for sure be picked up next. They’re just the ones on my shelf that I have my eye on.

One book that I’m reading is one that I read way back in 10th grade while living in Germany, “Jurassic Park”. I remember enjoying it immensely. If you haven’t read it and ever plan to, you may not want to continue reading. But if you don’t care or have seen the movie anyway it probably doesn’t matter.
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No, not the TV show. My friends. They’re great.

It is a nice feeling to feel appreciated. To feel like people actually enjoy having you around or are excited to see you. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had that feeling a few times in the last few weeks.

A couple of weeks ago a friend that I knew in Germany was passing through town on her way back to Anchorage, Alaska after a wedding. She was staying at Paul and Laura’s house as she and Laura were best friends in high school when I knew them. I hadn’t seen her but once or twice in the last 12 years (since I left Germany) so I defintely wanted to see her after I found out she would be in town. Laura came up with the devious plan to not tell her that I was living in Minnesota again and then I would stop by the house and surprise her.
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It has been another beautiful day in Minneapolis today. I woke up to the sounds of a thunderstorm. Don’t get me wrong, I love listening to thunderstorms, I missed them while living in Montana. But thunder meant rain and rain meant still no sun. I heard on the radio or the news that it has rained 20+ days out of the last 30 days. What is this, Seattle?

Oh well, it’s better than worrying about how black the sky is going to look from forest fires all summer like people in Montana have been.

My car is feeling like new. I got it all dolled up for my trip this weekend. I finally replaced the windshield, I got new wiper blades, got the oil changed, had the battery posts cleaned, and the radiator cap replaced. The only thing left is to get the trunk fixed, but that’s way more spendy.
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When something is so big that the words “gigantic” and “enormous” just don’t do it justice, what do you use? Ginormous of course. It’s a word I’ve used many times myself.

The article was pretty funny, though a link to the list itself would have been nice. I mean, come on, I know you’re a newspaper and you can’t link stuff from print, but your article is posted on the INTARNETS, learn how to use some of its features.

I think I’ve also used “gription” a few times.

A few of the words are pretty dumb and I would never use them. The only problem with the list from my perspective is that they spelled number 3 wrong. Any h4x0r who knows how to speak 1337 knows that it is spelled “w00t!” (those are zeroes, not oh’s), and certainly not “whoot” like in the Strib article.

On a side note, I made a new category to put little things like this in that don’t fit a normal category. For now I called it “Of Interest”, which, of course, is short for “Of Interest to Brenden and Most Likely No One Else”. So don’t be too surprised if you read something marked “Of Interest” and you think it is stupid. Or you could leave me a comment and tell me a better name for a category.

Just last Friday was the one year anniversary of my first blog post. I was too busy that day and forgot to write something about the grand date. Also, just a couple of days before, Steve remembered his accomplishment.

When we started this blogging thing, once again I was following Steve into something, coming in second. If you were at his wedding (’hi’ all one or two of you–the groom and maybe the bride) and heard my toast (probably one of my best speeches ever; I’ve never had people come up to me out of the blue and tell me that I did a great job speaking after the fact like that night) you would know that this isn’t an isolated incident. For whatever reason (most likely myriad reasons) I seem to come up just a bit shy of Steve’s standards in most things that we both try. It’s really quite funny. (Oh wait–I can ski better than he can–hooray!) I have a similar problem with my friend Chris. I can’t beat him at anything. We were playing bocce ball last night and I was up 6-2 on our way to 7. I lost 13-11. I’m starting to get a complex.

I didn’t set out with any kind of goal or theme in mind but if you look at the title of the blog and the topic of my first post you can see that the focus really hasn’t changed that much since the beginning.

Thanks for reading the inane ramblings of a run-of-the-mill, American 20-something–I’ll keep them coming for you.

You know, it’s pretty pathetic when I finally post stories about stuff that happened a week ago. So I’m going to quickly finish this post–then ending will be rushed, but that’s the way things go.

The Eck’s know how to throw a party. But to be fair, I didn’t know there would be hard alcohol there.

Though I guess I should have known. I was more thinking along the lines of a bunch of beer to wash down the burgers. I have a much easier time turning down beer than tasty mixed drinks. My drink of choice out in Montana turned out to be Southern Comfort and Coke. Though there was one New Year’s Eve when I had a few too many Absolut Vanilla and Pepsis. (Is that how you spell plural Pepsi? I’ve never tried before.) I have a sweet tooth, and it transfers over to my taste in alcoholic beverages, though I stay away from pink froo-froo drinks.

The night started off innocent enough. Paul, Laura, and I walked over to Steve’s house around 5 or 6pm. Steve was manning the grill and entertaining the guests. Paul and I stopped by the cooler to paruse the liquid fare. I had a Leinie’s Honey Weiss and Paul reached for the Heinekin, which he had never tried before but had wanted to.
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