Year: 2007

Only one journal entry for November, and I’m making it on the last day of the month. I’m not very good at having a web site. Anyhow, here’s the summary for the past month:

For me the month has been fairly uneventful as I’ve continued slogging away at work. Aaron, however, decided that November was as good a month as any to become a vagabond, and, after living with his work partner for two weeks, he moved in with Audrey and I for two weeks. Having someone who likes to snuggle sharing the bed necessitated the building of a giant pillow barrier, and all man-touches were prevented.

Thanksgiving brought the annual Turkey Bowl, and while I didn’t play I had the pleasure of witnessing Aaron come home covered in blood at halftime, only to slap on a band-aid and score three touchdowns in the second half before heading off to the emergency room for stitches. Following two hours during which Charlie Chi and I tried to make Aaron laugh while the doctor was putting needle and thread through his eyebrow we started the Thanksgiving dinner, and once again Sally put together a feast that put all other Thanksgiving dinners to shame. There was no eating contest this year, but Aaron managed to walk away victorious after putting two scoops of potatoes and an entire muffin in his mouth at once.

Last of all, here’s the obligatory pretty picture:

Los Angeles is on fire again; the TV coverage is pretty awesome, and the view from my office window of smoke pouring out of Malibu is something to see, particularly around sunset. It’s probably a bit callous to get any sort of enjoyment out of watching natural disasters, but quotes like the following make it tough to have too much sympathy for people fleeing multi-million dollar homes:

“We’re all scared to death and we have nowhere to go,” Susan Nuttall, 51, told The Associated Press as she sat in her black Mercedes in a cul-de-sac after fleeing her condominium near the Pepperdine campus. She was wearing a bathrobe and holding her Chihuahua.

In other news, the Goob and I made a trip to the Hollywood Bowl a couple of weeks ago to see Mr. Dave Matthews and his fine band put on a show. Kabobs from Daphne’s and satays from Thai Dishes started the evening out properly, and it only got better as Dave brought out guests including a rocker on the banjo (the dude played hard), Jon Mayer, and finally Steven and Damian Marley. Quote of the night:

Me (while washing my hands in the bathroom): “Dude, I reek of pot and beer…”

Random guy two sinks down: “That’s awesome man! Everyone reeks of pot and beer!”

I got an email yesterday saying that there had been a last-minute cancellation and asking if I was interested in a substantially discounted spot on a boat to South Georgia in two weeks. Retired Ryan would have gone in less than a fraction of a millisecond. Working Ryan is in the middle of a very large and very busy project, and his co-workers laughed out loud when he asked if there was any chance he could get away for four weeks. Working Ryan misses Retired Ryan.

Friday (or lately Saturday or Sunday) has been dubbed Funday. Aaron and I get together and go mini-golfing, play baseball, watch a video, or head to a random Brazilian restaurant and eat until we want to die. Good stuff. Last week Funday went to another level when Aaron decided we should go see Tim McGraw and Faith Hill in Anaheim. More good stuff. As usual our concert experience began with an odyssey as I cruised down I-5 looking for a place I could drop my car before eventually finding an Applebee’s and meeting the Goob a short time later. From there it was a short jaunt to Anaheim, and the festivities began.

We started by roaming the lot around Arrowhead Pond searching for scalpers – there are a surprising number of sketchy folks that hang around arenas, but in this case none passed the scalper test (scalper test = make eye contact in a non-creepy way). During this treasure hunt we were also trying to remember if a cop had to admit his profession if you asked – “Do you have tickets, and are you a cop?” seemed like a good defense against any illegal ticket purchases. And most importantly, as we carried out our ticket search we made sure to keep in constant contact with the predominantly female concertgoers. Life was good and about to get better.

After nearly circling the arena we finally ended up at the box office, and having been unsuccessful in our attempts to navigate the black market underground of concert tickets we asked at the window about availability and were rewarded with (expensive) seats that were less than thirty feet from the stage. Life continued to improve. Entering the arena we found ourselves in a sea of girls, cowboy hats, and the smell of Christmas. After a brief opening act Tim and Faith came onstage and entertained for four hours, by far the longest I’ve ever seen two people play for. During that time they managed to interact with hundreds of people sitting around the stage, including four girls that Faith brought up on stage. We ended up returning home after 2:00 AM, but it was another concert odyssey to remember.

Aaron and I were watching clips of the Wonder Years on YouTube tonight, a show that makes you want to write about being a kid. I’ll hold off on any Winnie Cooper-like stories lest they get too sappy, but instead go for the closest thing to a Paul Pfeiffer tale that I have…

Summer 1989

I didn’t have a lot of close friends growing up – my family moved before I started the third grade, and I didn’t really make any friends the first year in my new school. I then switched to another school for the fourth grade, and Rob, a kid down the block, switched to the same school at the same time. For the next five years we rode the bus together every day, and he became the closest thing I had to a best friend. We joined the Boy Scouts together but never told anyone about it because we didn’t want the other kids to make fun of us – despite the fact that the Scouts let us go rock climbing and whitewater rafting it was far from being a “cool” thing to do. Still, we had a lot of fun and were pretty active through about the eighth grade, and both of us ended up becoming Eagle Scouts together.

Of all the things we ever did in Scouts, the time that I remember the best was the Summer of 1989 at Summer Camp when we earned our wilderness survival merit badge. Amongst other requirements, to earn this badge we had to build a shelter using only rope and natural materials, and then sleep in it for two nights. For most of the kids going for this badge this requirement involved throwing something together in a few hours and then enduring two long nights; Rob and I had other plans. We started out lashing the frame for a lean-to against two trees, and made sure that the lashings were tight enough that we could both jump and hang on the bracings without anything slipping. We then started piling brush onto this structure to create a roof and walls, and we didn’t stop until the roof was a mass of brush about four feet thick. We followed that up by throwing leaves and pine needles on the structure for water-proofing, and then piling about a foot of pine needles inside for mattresses.

That night we slept like babies, but it was the following night, when the camp was hit by a torrential thunderstorm, that our lean-to proved itself. We woke up the following morning completely dry and discovered that everyone else in the camp, most of whom were in tents, were soaked. Rob and I got lucky – we built our lean-to as strong as we did just because we wanted to take a fun requirement and push it to ridiculous levels, but it was still pretty cool to see it succeed as well as it did. At the time it seemed like a memorable event, but looking back at it today it was one of those quintessential boyhood moments that grandpas tell their grandkids about, and that friends reminisce about during the rare times that they see each other again.