chaz720.net - journal

September 20, 2005

You got a reaction. You got a reaction didn't you? You took a white orchid. You took a white orchid and turned it blue. Something better than nothing? Something better than nothing is giving up. We all need to do something to try keep the truth from showing up. How dare you? How old are you now, anyway? How dare you? How old are you now, anyway? You're given a flower, but I guess that there's just no pleasing you. Your lips tastes sour, but you think that it's just me teasing you. You got a reaction. You got a reaction didn't you? You took a white orchid. You took a white orchid and turned it blue. Get behind me. Get behind me now, anyway. Get behind me. Get behind me now, anyway. You got a reaction. You got a reaction, didn't you? You took a white orchid. You took a white orchid and turned it blue.

I can always count on David to bring to my attention albums that I should have brought to my own attention, but I hadn't yet...

...because I wasn't paying attention.

I was busy, dilly-dallying one might say, with the usual school, work, and skydiving, forgetting to occasionally set some time aside for the truly important things in life: frisbee golf, foosball, getting drunk at baseball games and heckling the home team, having stretched limousines cart you and a dozen friends around on a bar crawl, and eating chicken-fried steak in a diner at 4am.

Another semester is starting up at school (my second to last I might reiterate) and the classes are going well thus far. Work is cruising along. My office mate is moving to a different project, so as of tomorrow I'll have an office to myself. It will be larger than my manager's, so I will have to strategically aquire and position additional furniture to deter the introduction of a new office mate. Skydiving continues, and I'm coming up on 600 jumps. I'm still mixing up RW, flying video, freeflying, and wingsuit jumps as much as possible. I do, however, have a new jumpsuit and lens suited to shoot 4way video on the way, and I plan to make that "the thing" next season.

But as nice as southern California is essentially all the time, I had to get away for a little while.

After Hans picked up a little something in Hermosa Beach for his girl back home, he and I set out under the cover of night for San Francisco. The drive was fairly uneventful save I-80 being closed just west of the Bay Bridge via a sign that said, in more words, "freeway closed, deal with it." After our eventual success finding a parking spot (and a brief spell revelling in it) we spent the weekend with David, Katie, Joel, and numerous cameos touring the city as our cab drivers navigated previously unexplored alley ways and whitened the faces of countless pedestrians for our viewing pleasure. We went to three of the four Cubs-Giants games that weekend, and saw two of the three victories the Cubs went home with. I also played golf for the first time in over three years on a small par three course in the middle of Golden Gate Park.

I came back to Los Angeles for a brief stint to watch lectures, bang out a few assignments for my courses, and finish a bunch of stuff for work. Then I was off to Pittsburgh.

I know it's not as bad as going to Australia or anything like that, but getting on a plane at 11:30pm, squeezing in a couple hours of sleep, and then waking up at 7am to start another day messes with your head. My head was then further messed with when I discovered Pittsburgh was actually pretty cool. I realize I was there to be with friends, but honestly, when I consulted a U.S. map as to the specific whereabouts of Pittsburgh, I was not particularly impressed. (It's proximity to Akron was rather off-putting as well) but the rivers give it a cool look, and it also had some fun hang outs. We BBQed at Sam's Friday night, and Saturday night the 14 of us hit up a whole mess of bars and clubs thanks to our comedically huge Ford Excursion and our driver Joe who, on more than one occasion, drew cheers by squeezing through city intersections and parallel parking that beast.

Sure, neither ended up being especially relaxing vacations (as some people prefer) but as I've mentioned before, I wouldn't have it any other way.

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