"Well there'll be smilin', there'll be laughin'
 Well that's good enough for me
 There'll be dancin' all around you
 This is where you want to be"
    Great Big Sea, Goin' Up

My number one desert island disk of all times is Rant & Roar by Great Big Sea. Its awsome (just ask Angie). Anyway, I've only had it on tape for years and this weekend I finally found it on CD. Ah... musical bliss.

Had a great weekend with Kevin. He had another friend to see Saturday afternoon so I got to help Matt move into his HUGE new townhouse in Kirkland. Teasing about moving to the eastside aside... this place is incredible. Its tragic that he's becoming a domestic suburbanite, but he couldn't have picked a nicer place for the money.

Satuday night I Kevin and I hooked up with Brian to fry catfish. Now I've already discovered I don't like the stuff much, but these two are both from New Orleans so I thought they could have a bonding experience. They did. It was creepy. Don't ever mention Tony Chaucher's Fish Fry to me. Ever.

Later that night we went to see The Shitkickers play at the Dubliner. A good show. Lots of white people dancing which is always good. I didn't partake. I've just never been good at asking people to dance at anything other than a dance. Perhaps its the way guys growl at you when you try talking to their dates. Or the way girls who go to bars in groups always make a point to turn their back on you when you come over. Aw to hell with 'em.

Speaking of dancing with girls... I've discovered an unbelievable Monday night dance in Greenlake where all the follows are incredible dancers and pretty damn hot to boot. I used to go to this dance over a year ago, but after Lisa and I split up I avoided it for fear of running into her. Well time fixes everything so I'm back. I actually got a nice vibe from a girl the other week. I saw her tonight at the Century and chatted her up a bit. She's really great, but I get the impression she's 19 or 20. *SIGH* that's the danger of all-ages dances.

"Yo momma is so lost, Google can't find her."
    BBSpot

HA! HA! HA! That's some funny S***.

So Saturday's performance went well. It was helped out immensly by the fact that another team performed just before us and they had some pretty big goofs. Like 'Oh, I don't think he was supposed to drop her on her ass like that' big, but the crowd was supportive so it set a good tone.

I think I did well, but I won't really know till I watch the video. Honestly watching myself dance scares me more than performing does.

On Sunday I joined up with my old Puzzlehunt team for this year's hunt, and while we sucked worse than we've ever sucked before it was an AMAZING hunt. The theme was Alice in Wonderland and its going to be hard for anyone to out-geek the guys who put on this years hunt.

One puzzle lead you to call a phone number and ask for the "puzzle special". Well the number was for pizza hut, and they actually had a special pizza on which the toppings were clues. One puzzle required you to solve the sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. How did they know what would be in this puzzle because they created this weeks puzzle! However, the truely unbelievable part is that they got someone to put a proposal before the Washington State legislation to have that weekend declared "Alice in puzzlehunt weekend" and it passed!

Can we say Geek? I knew you could.

"Cause we are living in a material world"
    Madonna

Now this is just dumb:
The Seattle Times: Eastside News: What do (some) women want? A Microsoft man

"I could pay off my tab, pour myself in a cab
 And be back to work before two
 At a moment like this I can't help but wonder:
 What would Jimmy Buffet do?"
    Alan Jackson (with Jimmy Buffet), It's 5 O'clock Somewhere

So I got to work really early this morning (7:00am) so when 5:00pm rolled around I decided I could sneak out without feeling guilty. This put me downtown with an hour to kill before practice. A wiser man might have had dinner. Me? I pounded two pints of Guiness on an empty stomach in the 40minutes just before our four hour rehersal.

That might sound like a dumb move, but it was actually brilliant. We've got our first show on Saturday(!) and everyone is really stressed over the piece we're doing. We got a lot done but there was a lot of arguing and shouting. Fortunatly I remained within the padded walls of my beer buzz and so it was alllll gooood.

Actually our routine is a really good one, and if we can just tune it up several notches by Saturday I think we'll look good. Personally I'm terrified. Not of the routine going well, but just of performing in front of an audience. An audience of dancers no less. Shit, let's change the subject.

Went on a retreat to Lake Tapps with the team last weekend and had a great time. Lots of food, games, and randome episodes. I learned one of the coolest party games every, and I'd love to tell you about it, but one of the main rules is that you can never write it down: you have to pass it on in person.

Sunday night I took Cindy to see Henry Rollins do his spoken word tour at The Moore. Cindy loves him and I bought the tickets the moment they went on sale so we had rockstar seats (6th row dead center). This was especially cool since it turned out that this was the show they were taping for his DVD. A side effect of this was that Hank did an extra long set: about 3.5 hours of material! It was way fun.

Anyway, I'm exhausted. If I don't talk to yall before Satuday be sending me dontfuckupinfrontofyourpeers vibes.

"'Will you dance with me now, Heaven's Child?', sang The Clown
 'We've nothing to lose, but your wings and my frown'"
    Flogging Molly, So May The Living Be Dead (In Our Wake)

The Portland Lindy Exchange...

I cannot tell you how much fun I had. Here's a rough chronology:

8:15pm Friday Meet a bunch of folks to catch Starsky & Hutch. It was OK

11:00pm Friday Pile into a van(agon) with Luke, Ted, Gin, and Mebby (one of the many girls that just seem to perpetually surround Luke. He's got a kind of an Ashton Kutcher thing going on).

2:00am Saturday Arrive at the Northstar Ballroom in Portland. Late night dancing is still going strong with a couple hundred dancers so we join in. There's a big main floor playing your basic jazz, and a blues room downstairs. I've mentioned blues dancing before. I'll go into it more later. Saw Chris (Lisa's new boy) and decided that a year of him dodging me was too long. I had a nice chat with him and did my best to give him the impression that I really don't hate him. Was he convinced? Don't know.

5:30am Saturday Call it a night as Late Night winds down. Stagger back to van with Luke, Ted, Gin, and some other girl (not Mebby) again somehow attached to Luke. Drive back to hotel, shower, and pass out. Luke and Ted both snore like cartoon characters.

1:00pm Saturday Get up and have brunch at the Cafe Bijou. Wonderful meal. Got for a walk along the river. Ted, Gin, and I make ourselves scare while Luke tries to get in good with whatsername.

3:30pm Saturday Join up with a bunch of dancers doing a pub crawl. Get a good buzz on. Play no limit Texas Hold 'Em with sugar packets.

11:00pm Saturday After a lot of silly bullshit and Thai food we arrive at the Sunnyside Grange for the Saturday Night Dance featuring the band Pork Pie. Its a tiny place with about five times the number of people in it that it was meant to hold. Its also about 80 zillion degrees in there. The band plays for three minutes, then some dude witha microphone that no one can hear talks for five minutes. This process repeats for an hour and then they're done. If you divide the cover charge by the number of dances I had I paid about $1.25 per dance.

12:00am Sunday Leave the grange for late night (which is about 15 minutes away). Luke tried to take several shortcuts and that puts us back in Washington State once (almost twice).

1:15am Sunday Arrive at late night. I had mentioned to Gin earlier that I wished I knew how to really dance the blues so she gave me some quick lessons and several great pointers. Everything she showed me was practical, but to simplify things for the non-dancer: blues dancing is basically have sex while standing up with your clothes on.

6:00am Sunday Door almost hits our asses on the way out as we close out the dance.

12:00pm Sunday Get up, Check out, and go eat Dim Sum with yet another one of Luke's girls.

2:30pm Sunday Arrive at Pioneer Square (Portland). Its a big plaza in the center of downtown and on this perfect sunny afternoon its become a dance floor for a couple hundred dancers. We light it up while "people passing by just stare with wide-eyed wonder" (-Van Morrison, Wild Night). It was awesome!

4:30pm Sunday Dance ends. Gin goes home, Ted goes for a massage, and Luke and I follow cute girls to Gellato place. Afterwards we run an errand to a Croation grocery so Luke can pick up a bunch of junk food that I can't pronounce while he speaks perfect Croation with the proprietor. The boy is like an onion. So many layers. Afterwards we eat a greasy dinner at a little dive called Roxy's right near...

8:00pm Sunday The Crystal Ballroom. "McMenamins Crystal Ballroom, a famous Portland dance hall that dates from 1914, sat empty for three decades until being completely refurbished in 1997. Rudolph Valentino danced the tango here in 1923." (-Yahoo Travel) The dance floor is 7,500 square feet, and build on springs so it litterally bounces under your feet like a trampoline. Watching the floor from the side while people are dancing makes gives the impression of waves on the ocean. A full band with vocalist Lilly Wild performed for three hours while we tore it up.

11:15pm Sunday Meet up with Bethany, my ride, and head for Seattle.

2:20am Monday Arrive home.

Man I'm glad I took today off. :-)

"What did the five fingers say to the face? SLAP!"
    Rick James

So I don't watch TV, and for the most part I'm glad. However, even cable TV occasionally comes up with something good. There was a recent episode of The Chappelle Show where Charlie Murphy (Eddie's older borther who works on the show) told a bunch of true stories about incidents between him and Rick James. I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard.

Oh, and here's something interesting I learned yesterday: There are two married couples on our team. One of the couples apparently used to be in acting. I think Allison was in a few commercials. Anyway, years ago they were in an acting class with Vhonda (sp?) Shepard and actually became good friends with her. Good enough that she actually played at their wedding and wrote a song for them. I'm sure it was no "Why don't we just Elope", but I still thought it was a nice gesture.

"I am lonlely (duh duh duh DA)
 Its really hard (duh-duh duh DA duh)
 This poem... sucks"
    Mike Meyers, So I Married An Axe Muderer

Tonight was really fun. We went to a gymnastics school to practive arials (read: throwing girls around) on the mats. We learned some simeple throw-outs.,The Knickerbocker (where you stand side by side and flip the girl backwards over your arm), and The Overhead (girl rocks back, shoots passed you and you hook her arm and swing her back over your head to where she started from). It was way cool.

Then when we were done I got to do something I always wanted to do: play in the foam pit! You know what I mean... that five or six foot deep swimming pool that's filled with foam blocks. All gymnastics places have them. They smell, but MAN are they fun to jump into.