Wait, baby, stop yelling. I haven’t been seeing another blog, I swear! No, I’m not using my LiveJournal or MySpace. I haven’t even posted that much on MoreCooler! You know you’re the only one for me. Hey hey, put down that frying pan. Let’s talk about this. I promise I’ll come see you more. Once a week? Okay, I can do that. No, really, I can. Give me a chance. Okay, let me explain where I’ve been for the last couple of months.

Hawaii

From 8/31 to 9/7, I was in Maui with Allison, Matt, Martin, Chris, and Jua. It was fantastically beautiful. We stayed at Matt’s condo, and had a blast. We drove the road to Hana, saw the sunrise from Haleakala, saw a magic show, went to a feast, ate some fantastic food, went kayaking (where I found out I am a better kayaker than Hulk Hogan), snorkled, and just enjoyed the condo. We also did a lot of eating out, so my waistline isn’t quite so happy, but otherwise it was a great week. Here are some pictures:

• My camera
• Waterproof camera
• Allison’s camera
• Kayaking photos

Work

Work has been crazy busy ever since I got back from Hawaii. I’ve been off of Autos Custom for a few weeks to work on a new project that will be released next week. We are officially code frozen, so that means I get to sleep this weekend instead of heading into work on a Saturday. I was able to keep myself sane with doses of the donuts and coffeecake brought into our daily meetings, my new ginger peach tea, and liberal doses of Rachel and Allison. It’s an exciting, interesting project, and I was able to take a lot of responsibility for the frontend portion of it. Hopefully it will be a big success! I’ll be sure to post a link here when it’s live to the public.

Concerts

Even with all the business of work, I did find some time to get to a bunch of concerts in September, although I did miss Cowboy Mouth’s show in San Francisco when I was in Hawaii which makes me sad. Upon returning from Hawaii, I went to see Butch Walker and the Let’s Go Out Tonites, who were amazing. Definitely up there with Cowboy Mouth in terms of sheer energy and really feeding off of the crowd. I had high hopes, and they were exceeded by the performance. I didn’t take my camera, but here are some great photos I found from the show. A couple of weeks later, Allison and I went to see Snow Patrol at the Warfield. I had never been there, and didn’t realize what a shady neighborhood that was. We walked very quickly back to the car after the show, just in case. Also, Augustana opened, who I had never heard of but who have since made it into regular rotation on my MP3 player. At the end of the month, Allison, Blake and I went to see Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers in Berkeley, which was another venue where I had never been. We had lawn seats, and the lawn had a REALLY sharp incline, so we had to find a way to dig in in order to not slide down the hill. We noticed that used to be behind us on our left were actually next to us by about halfway through the show. Seating aside, the show was great. It had been a few years since I’d seen them live, and Blake and Allison had never seen them at all, so it was great to hear all the old favorites, plus some special treats. They played “Handle With Care”, which is my favorite Traveling Wilburys song, so it was fun to see it live. Also, Stevie Nicks came out and sang a few songs, so Allison’s night was made by that. All in all, it was a lot of fun.

Minnesota

Even with work being crazy, I was still able to make it to Minnesota to visit Rachel in October. We’ve recently discovered a pair of Sun Country flights that allow use to fly round-trip in a weekend without needing to use the vacation days we’re saving for Peru. I flew out on the red-eye Friday night, and my plan to move my seat worked out where I didn’t have anyone next to me. Then after we could move around the cabin, the guy in my row got up and snagged an empty row in the back, leaving me with my own row as well, so I was able to lay out and nap for most of the flight. A pleasant surprise that helped me last through Saturday. We went out to eat at some fantastic places, did a lot of walking, shopped for Allison’s birthday week, went to some of the best swings ever, returned frozen yogurt because we didn’t like it (who knew you could do that AND have the store employee look apologetic when it happened?!), helped a cookware store employee figure out how to scam his wife into letting him have a new toy, visited the barn where Rachel rides horses, ate too much dessert, discovered the wonder of Newman-Os, celebrated the life of Steve Irwin, and planned for Peru. All in the course of two days. Not bad.

Golf

I’ve been taking golf lessons with Sriram for the last few weeks, and now we’re going to make an attempt to play regularly with some of the people from our class. We have 5 free rounds, so we’ll at least use those up. Hopefully we’ll be able to not embarrass ourselves too badly. It’s been a lot of fun, and gives me another way to get out of the house and spend some time with people.

Broken computer

To top it all off, I haven’t had the best luck with internet access from home lately. My laptop decided that it only wants to load webpages for the first few minutes that its on, but after that, it’s done. It can ping out, as well as connect to IM and poker networks, but no web. With work keeping me so busy, I haven’t had the time or energy to debug it, so that has severely limited my availability from home. Hopefully that will be resolved soon.

See? There was a lot going on, so much so that I probably forgot something. I’ve been busy, but it’s not like I don’t miss you. I do. I mean to come by sooner and explain, but I was working and it was hard to get away. Things are going to change, darling.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 9:28 am and is filed under Music, Personal Musings, Yahoo!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

tagged allison, augustana, butch walker, Chris, golf, haleakala, hana, hulk hogan, Jua, martin, matt, maui, minneapolis, peru, rachel, Snow Patrol, sriram, steve irwin, stevie nicks, tom petty, yahoo autos and yahoo autos custom