Category Archives: Life

Wainwright

July 8, 2007

I didn’t know the definition of overpowered until I tried kiting at Rufus today.

The wind in the Gorge has been absolutely nuking solid for the past week. It’s been windier than stink, and being a kiteboarder I’ve been sadly beached for the last couple days as the windsurfers have ripped it up. Oh well. They deserve a chance for some fun… I’ve been kiting nearly four days a week for the entire summer while they have been sitting on the beach waiting for the wind to pick up, so I suppose I can allow them a week of the good stuff.

A couple days ago I jammed across the bridge after work to take some pictures at The Hatchery of riders practicing for the Freestyle Frenzy competition. The place was a mad house, and it took me nearly an hour just to find a parking spot. Cars were double and even triple parked, and the lot scene, with its haphazard fashion and people scattered about in lawn chairs clutching cans of Rainier, reminded me of a Phish concert more than anything else.

I had been shooting photos at The Hatch for over an hour until I had finally gotten warmed up, and was dismayed when I realized that I had already shot through my 2GB card. Yup. I had shot 400 pictures, 99% of them rejects, and it wasn’t until that point that I felt like I was finally hitting my stride. For my final hour I traded off between deleting and shooting, which while being terribly inefficient was completely necessary to grab some more decent shots.

Next week my Canon L lenses show up, which while greatly improving my ability to take kick-ass photos will also certainly increase my stress associated with exposing my camera to the elements. Blazing sun and 100 degree temperatures, coupled with 30 mph of blowing sand and river, don’t necessarily create the ideal studio environment.

The wind at the Event Site has been so wonky the last few days that today I drove out east in search of some more consistent wind. I ended up at Rufus and proceeded to spend two hours on the beach, hemming and hawing about whether to put a kite in the air and go out on the water. The question was a valid one. The wind was blowing at a constant 30 mph, and there were fellows who had a good 40 pounds on me who were completely lit up on five meter kites. The smallest I had was a seven.

Finally a fellow I had met two years ago down in Los Barriles showed up, and after some deliberation he went out on his ten meter North Rhino. Now, even though this guy had a good 100 pounds on me and was built like a meat tree, his was sufficient inspiration for me to get my ass in gear and go kiting. I decided that I would take a single reach out, and if the conditions were truly uncontrollable I would come back and land my kite.

And that’s exactly what I did.

The story being that I made it back. These were some seriously crazy conditions at Rufus today, and two weeks ago they would have chewed me up something fierce. I had my seven meter kite completely depowered and completely sheeted out, and yet was still totally lit the fuck up. While nothing bad happened during my short session, I realized while I was out there that all of my energy and concentration was focused merely on kiting. If anything extraneous were to come along, from a freak gust to a rogue wave to a grain barge to a lost board to a dropped kite, I would have been fucked. Not only that, I would have been fucked in five foot swell, which is a new category entirely.

So that was that. I went out and I came back. All in all, I’m glad that I at least tried kiting today at Rufus, if only for an opportunity to experience those conditions and give myself a yardstick for measuring future sessions. It’s important to find and test these limits on occasion, for without knowing them it would be easy to develop a false sense of confidence in your abilities. It’s humbling sessions like this that keep you real.

After getting back from Rufus this afternoon I rigged up and went kiting at The Spit, and had a ton of fun in not-so-life-threatening conditions. Afterwards I rode my bike downtown and met Jason, Kelly and some friends at Double Mountain for beer. We alternated our activities between drinking microbrews, pulling hair out of a yellow labrador from Alaska, and laughing at a malamute that sounded like one of the Three Stooges.

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Yard Work

July 4, 2007

Today I drank my homebrewed IPA, lit off fireworks, and set my lawn on fire. Thus I would consider it a wildly successful Fourth of July.

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Prependence Day

July 3, 2007

Robby Naish, the Robby Naish, was here this weekend. He hung around the shop for a few hours on Sunday night, visiting with people and signing autographs and exuding potent waves of awesomeness. I was all up in his grill taking photographs for most of the night, which is now a thing I do.

Today was hot. On my lunch break I went home just to sit at my kitchen table and sweat.

I went to the Hood River Wal-Mart today, also known as The Happiest Place On Earth. No matter where I turned I was always boxed in by pet food.

There’s something unwholesome about buying fireworks after dark out of a tent pitched in a parking lot, which is probably why I was excited enough to throw down twenty bucks for a brick of the shit. That, and they had a strobe light. I’m helpless whenever there’s a strobe light.

Or anything bright and shiny, for that matter.

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Spike

June 24, 2007

Friday I traded some hours with Mark at the shop, scoring myself a three-hour lunch break that I split between eating and kiteboarding. The eating was good and the kiteboarding was okay… the wind was really light, and I only managed a few reaches before deciding it was best to come back in, and avoid getting stuck out in the middle of the river if the wind decided to die completely. It was the kind of session that we typically describe with a shrug and the line, “At least I got wet.”

Fortunately the wind had picked up by the time Bea and I closed the shop for the night, so we jammed down to the beach for an evening kite session. Bea tinkered in the shallows while I spent my time upwind playing in the swell, working on my toeside carves. After the session Topher gave me a ride to the parking lot in the back of his truck, and I headed back home for the late night that was to be.

Before they left, Jake and his gang of crag rats got me a growler as a “thanks for letting us turn your living room into a base camp, sleep on your floor, use your shower, and keep really weird hours” gift, sixty-four delicious ounces of Full Sail’s Son of Spot IPA. That night I invited some friends over, and before I knew it my house had filled up with ten people or so, many whom I did not know. I put everyone on a strict regimen of Full Sail and homebrew, and when that dried up we switched to Rainier and cigarettes.

While checking out my digs Jeff discovered I had a Wii, so the closing hours of the night were dedicated to some serious Wii Bowling. I could hardly keep my balance and lost to all my opponents by a scant handful of points, even losing the game where Wyatt and I bowled straight spares on all but one frame. Our party dissolved its little self at around 2:00 in the morning.

Saturday I was hung over. All day. I went to the Sandbar in the afternoon, hoping that the wind and sun would pull me out of my spinning fog and I could get myself in a mood to go kiting. No deal. I stood at the edge of the parking lot for fifteen minutes watching the action from the hill, and all I felt were pangs of jealousy for all the people who were out on the water and didn’t have headaches. I went home and slept some more.

Feeling much better on Sunday I went back to the Sandbar, hiked out to the launch spot and started pumping up my nine meter kite. In the time it took me to do that the wind had picked up, and before long I was hiking back to my car to trade the nine for my seven. By the time I got back to the launch spot the wind had calmed down again, all the way back to solid nine meter conditions, but I said fuck it and rigged my seven anyway.

I went out for half an hour until deciding that it was too light to risk going any longer, and on my way back in I got caught in a lull and dropped my kite. After a bit of swimming I made it back to my launch spot, and spent some time just hanging out with other kiters, shooting the shit and helping launch and land people. All the while we were watching a band of clouds and rain make their way up the Gorge, and we wondered what sort of wind they would bring with them.

And then we knew. Almost instantly the river turned into a surly, boiling cauldron of whitecaps. In the distance we could see the dust from the Hook being whipped from the ground, a devouring orange cloud that consumed our view. Gear went pin-wheeling when the wind finally hit the Sandbar, and everyone scrambled to protect their kites from the squall.

I piled all my stuff on my kite to keep it in place, and shoveled so much sand onto it I nearly buried it from view. The wind did the rest. Before long we were in a full-on sandstorm, and I had to pull my wetsuit back on to temper its rage against my flesh. So much sand was blowing that when you looked downwind across the Delta, all you could see was a solid grey cloud.

However, whatever we were experiencing on the Sandbar was nothing compared to what was happening out on the water. There were about ten or fifteen kiters out, and they were all fighting the wind and trying to limp back to the beach. We helped people with landing their kites as soon as they got in range, and while many seemed a bit brow-beaten it didn’t look like anyone had actually gotten injured out there.

Gear did not fair quite so well, and there were many tales of ripped kites and lost boards. One kite actually abandoned its owner, flying overhead along the far side of the sandbar with surprising beauty and danger.

The storm eventually subsided and it seemed that everyone had made it back to shore, so I excavated my kite, packed up my belongings and headed back to my car. Calm had returned to the Sandbar, but most of us were too gun-shy to get back on the water again. Sirens blaring in the distance suggested that there were other stories to this day.

June 24, 2007 Wind Graph for the Event Site

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Heart

June 17, 2007

I don’t know what to say, so pardon my obliqueness.

When Kate told me the news I booked a flight back to Minnesota for the following day.

That was a week ago last Friday.

Kate and I went canoeing. We visited with friends. We went to the zoo. We picked strawberries.

The service was this past Saturday. It was at the arboretum. It was beautiful.

Everyone is doing remarkably well, all things considered.

I arrived back in Hood River today. Kate leaves for Menogyn tomorrow.

Thank you.

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Hobby Farm

May 10, 2007

Tonight my house smells like a brewery, as I just finished my first attempt at crafting my own beer. It’s going well so far, and while I didn’t commit any large-scale disasters in cooking up my wort, I am a bit concerned that the fermentation isn’t kicking in yet. At 90 degrees, I may have added the yeast too early. It will be another two days before I know definitively, but I seem to have inherited my mother’s knack for killing yeast.

Nevertheless, if this project is successful I will have five gallons of beer at my disposal. I feel the risk is one that is both worthy and calculated.

Meanwhile I’m in the process of charging the battery to my scooter, which I can’t seem to keep juiced up. They recommend not using the electric starter on the scooter when going on trips shorter than twenty miles, and since I’m not yet commuting from The Dalles down I-84 at a suicidal 30 mph, it’s difficult to squeeze a twenty mile trip out of Hood River.

Thus, I’ve been kick-starting the scooter for the last couple weeks hoping that the alternator will charge the battery back up, but every time I neglect the poor girl for more than two days the battery goes right back to zero. Once that happens I can’t, for the life of me, get the darn thing started, and when I finally do it belches blue smoke.

I am told that the smoke is the result of the scooter still trying to burn through a batch of chainsaw oil, before it can reach the “really good stuff” that it has been topped off with. I am also told that the scooter automatically handles its own two-stroke oil/gasoline ratio, which to me borders on pure alchemy. Everything I know about scooters I learned from a homebrew enthusiast, and everything I know about homebrewing I learned from a scooter enthusiast.

The only reason I had time to brew beer today was because the wind cut out early this evening. Otherwise I’ve been out kiteboarding the last three nights in a row. Bea and I will cut out of work immediately after closing and head down to The Spit (also known as The Sandbar, The Delta, The Boneyard and The Honeypot) for an evening session, and try to make do with whatever wind the gods throw our way.

I have a new kite and board this year, a Cabrinha Omega and a North Jaime Pro respectively, and even though I’m still getting used to them I can already tell that they’re a major upgrade from my old gear. The kite depowers like a dream, which keeps me from getting dragged downwind into the The Boneyard’s gnarly skeletons every time a gust hits. The smaller board edges upwind like crazy, and keeps me from getting blown into the Marina, or under the Hood River Bridge for that matter. Seriously. Bridges are for trolls, not for kiteboarders.

I still have the grab handle on my kiteboard, partially because it’s helpful, partially because it’s hopelessly uncool, but mostly because I love the look I get when I tell people that I’m working on “sick board-off tricks.” That line alone goes a long way in reinforcing my second reason for keeping the grab handle.

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Transition

March 15, 2007

Yesterday I got back from SXSW. It was an incredible time.

My liver still aches.

My last night in Austin I got a single hour of sleep.

Tomorrow Kate and I leave for Zion.

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Web Nerd Geek Party

March 2, 2007

Last October I accidentally threw away my iPod Shuffle. This may sound like an interesting story, but more than anything it was dumb. Just dumb. Sure, it was just one of the old style Shuffles, the kind that was as big as a pack of gum which seemed really small for about fifteen minutes there, and I had already replaced it once after all the buttons had stopped working, but that little bastard still set me back $150 at the time.

Last week my new iPod Shuffle arrived, the latest version of the latest kind that has a built-in clip and comes with Apple’s new-style headphones and is about the size of a postage stamp if postage stamps were a quarter of an inch thick and cost $79. Honestly, this thing is small. I almost swallowed it just taking it out of the box.

Anywho, I love the new Shuffle. At first I had planned on getting a nano, seeing as how the cheapest model would be the same price that I paid for my original Shuffle. After I realized that for my purposes I would need an armband or some crazy carrying shit like that, and discovering that such nonsense would run me an extra $30 or so, the Shuffle and its handy clip started looking much more attractive. I don’t need much from an mp3 player… I just need something that makes noise in my ears while I’m at the gym. Until I can afford a personal trainer, an iPod it is.

Hence the Shuffle, which is of a size that is so ridiculously small that it makes you wonder why your headphones need to plug into anything anymore, or even need to have cords for that matter. I still don’t have a proper full-size iPod, partly because I have no real use for one in my regular life, and partly because I keep putting off the purchase, in the interest of getting the next latest-and-greatest edition from Apple. I’ve been waiting for the multi-touch iPod ever since the iPhone was announced, and I know now that it’s only a matter of time.

It’s amazing when you realize that the click wheel, which was quite possibly the most innovative UI development of the oughts, has already been rendered completely irrelevant by the very company that invented it in the first place.

In other news, a week from today I take off for my second shot at SXSW. My first time was a blast and I got to spend it with my fellow UI-geek friend (and occasional lover) Jake Ingman, along with Sally and a number of other great friends we made down there in Austin. Jake and I have known of each other’s existences since 2001, but we didn’t hook up until SXSW last year. We rekindled our relationship through the 37signals personal ads (this joke was funnier before they started running their Job and Gig Boards) on a thread about Jim Brandenburg, and we spent our downtime at “South By” sharing the same bed. Or staying up all night blogging and uploading photos to Flickr. What can I say, we were both hopeless romantics at the time.

Jake and I are both jammin’ down to SXSW again this year, only this time around we’ve got two beds between us. Kate assured me, however, that she would be totally okay if we decided to share again. I guess we’ll just have to see what Anne says about the whole deal. Seriously though, some things just get out of control down in Texas.

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Hired Goon

February 4, 2007

Phew.

I guess there’s been some changes ’round these parts over the last couple weeks. I’ve been busy with those so I’ve kinda been neglecting some things, small things like this blog and personal hygiene and common decency.

When I got back from Walla Walla last Sunday someone had been kind enough to leave me a dead bird on the sidewalk to my house. The next morning the bird was gone, replaced by little feathered turds. That afternoon I came home to find a dismembered wing on my front step, and the turds were missing.

So there was that.

Also, I’ve been busy raising a beard again. It’s hard work and it takes a lot of time and effort, especially for the few of us who do not have Chuck Norris in our ancestry. There’s so few of us.

So very few.

But yes, a beard. By the looks of things this is the winter of the Sketchy Facial Hair, and I wanted to throw in my lot. I would also like to have a beard for SXSW, along with a mohawk, if I can muster the guts to do that again. Yeah, a beard and a mohawk, so I can appear to be consistent with my Flickr and Facebook and Upcoming.org profile photos. We call this “branding.”

This “alcoholic energy drink meets malt beverage” tastes like an atrocity.

That’s branding, too.

Hey, Kate took me to the Walla Walla Wal-Wal-Mart when I was back over there, and it is vastly superior to the Hood River Wal-Mart, and we actually went there twice, once to buy a potted plant and frozen chilies and again to buy windshield wipers and twelve mason jars, and both times the same clerk helped us. The same clerk! At checkout lanes that were at complete opposite ends of the store! And there’s a tram that runs every seven minutes to take you from one opposite end of the store to the other!

He was a really cool clerk, too. We wondered why he was working at Wal-Mart, being as cool as that. I thought he was probably writing a book about his experience, or at least blogging it.

Twelve mason jars is a lot more mason jars than I thought I needed, so I’ve been spending my time finding things to fill them up with, things like basmati rice and cashews and yerba mate. Yerba mate has a very strong organic, earthy taste to it, which is a nice way of saying it tastes like dirt. It’s dirt jam-packed with caffeine, though, so I’m not about to criticize. My bombilla fell apart way before the Web 2.0 boom so I need to find a new one before I can drink my mate again. Taragui, it was. The mate, that is. You can buy it by the kilo, like other things you can buy.

There was something else.

Oh yeah.

Tomorrow I start my new job at my windsurfing and kiteboarding shop. Even though job titles are kinda ridiculous and we really have no use for them, I shall be working as the Director of Web Marketing for Big Winds, a position which is known internally as “Hey, we have our own computer geek!”

I have worked for Big Winds a couple of times in the past, once in 2003 and again in 2005, and I hearts them lots and lots. I love the people who work there, I love the store and the products, and I love their business ethos. Needless to say, I’m stoked as hell to work for these guys, to be surrounded by people again, to be active in the community, and to know that this summer I will kiteboard so much I won’t even be able to piss straight.

The upshot of all this is that I’m taking on Big Winds as a full-time job, and I’m going to have very little time to run Brainside Out. I’m still kinda stunned by the whole bit, shocked and nervous and excited and somewhat nauseous, but I think there’s a tremendous opportunity to do some kick-ass stuff here. I’ve told my clients about the change, and they have all been extremely supportive and enthusiastic. Like, bummed I won’t be able to rock stuff for them anymore, but amped for me nonetheless.

Still, I’m freaked out by the fact that I’ll actually need to wake up in the morning. I suppose it’s a small price to pay to be able to interact with real people, though.

Brainside Out will continue to exist, perchance as a shadow of its formal self, but dammit if it’s not going anywhere. I’ve been running that dealy-deal for 1 1/2 years, have gotten to build some great websites for some absolutely ripshitkickass clients, and I take a huge amount of satisfaction in knowing that I’m fully capable of running my own show. With the ridiculous degree of autonomy that I’ve been enjoying in running Brainside Out, the shop may have gotten more than they bargained for. I mean, I build good shit, but I’m used to doing it on my own terms.

That said, I did work for them in-house on two separate occasions, for half a year on both counts. In 2003 I shared an office with the head manager for a couple weeks, until he realized that I talked and cursed to myself so much that I needed to be quarantined to my own office. Big Winds was also the first client that Brainside Out ever had, and thus precipitated my move to indie status.

Nah, they know what they’re gettin’. And I’m stoked.

Geez, did I mention I’m stoked?

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Breakfast at Wendy’s

January 13, 2007

The weather back here in Hood River has been chilly as of late, and we’ve even got a coat of snow that’s managed to hang around for a few days. Thus warmed internally by the cold fire of gin, I find within myself a desire to reflect on the events of the last couple weeks.

It all started way back in December of last year, a few scant days before Christmas, when we charged through the biggest snowfall the Gorge has seen so far this season in order to get my sorry self to the Portland airport. It was there, after removing my shoes and belt and going through the world’s strictest of strict security, that I was treated to the worst breakfast ever visited upon mankind.

My first mistake was choosing Wendy’s as my poison of choice that morning. Wendy’s, yes, which is known across the globe for its culinary prowess in preparing fine breakfasts. I’ll be the first to admit that from the beginning of this, I was simply asking for trouble.

I went with Wendy’s finest, a sausage biscuit with egg and cheese. I made it a combo so I could get a bag of Li’l Tater Grease Soak-ums, and some coffee that you can’t drink at first because it’s so piping hot, and you can’t drink later because it tastes so dreadful.

But the namesake of this combo, yikes. My sausage biscuit with egg and cheese was such an abomination that it may have turned me off from the whole “sausage biscuit with egg and cheese as a palatable breakfast choice” thing for the rest of my life. It was bad, I tell you. The sausage was cold and the biscuit was burned, and it was like trying to eat a tire sandwiched between two coal seams. Despite a ravenous hunger I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it.

I tried to cut my losses by focusing instead on the hash brown things, which I managed to finish even though they had already soaked their paper bag translucent with grease. I also put considerable effort into downing my cup of magma, which didn’t do a whole hell of a lot besides burn the inside of my mouth and leave behind stringy bits of flesh that would plague me for the rest of the day.

In all honesty, however, I took a strange comfort in the fact that my sausage biscuit was burned and horrible. I guess it’s nice to know that somewhere in the preparation of this breakfast there is still enough human intervention to allow for such an error. I had always believed that the entire process of fulfilling my fast food order was one of automation, of conveyor belts deep-frying my fries and chixxen nuggets, and heartless robots thawing my quasi-meat product with their eye lasers.

No. That my breakfast at Wendy’s could be so abhorrent, that it could deviate so far from the consistent mediocrity that we expect, nay, demand from such establishments, is proof that at least one disenchanted fast food employee must have been involved in its lax preparation. This error reveals the manner by which the meal must have been created, and it proves that humans still have enough influence over the process to fuck it all up.

What’s also notable is that my breakfast had to be prepared with only the tools and ingredients that could make it through security, which these days excludes such high-risk items as butter knives and water. Ultimately, I should consider myself lucky that the meal came out as well as it did.

I only wish I could say the same for the rest of my trip to Minneapolis.

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