half a cat

Here are the pictures from the Memorial Day ride to the Natural Bridge.

It was a fantastic day, the weather was the best of the whole weekend. Mary & Landon rode up on their bike (the green one), I rode mine, and Matt & Mandy followed in their truck with their dogs. The drive from Billings to Big Timber was uneventful, but got in some cool 90mph single lane side-by-side riding with Landon. It was neat to hear the bikes right next to each other – there is almost no exhaust note and all you can hear is the raw motor sounds. Grunt. We also stretched out the bikes legs a bit and zoomed up near the 100mph barrier for a while. Lunch was in Big Timber at this pizza place, can’t place the name at the moment. It was really good and a nice mid-ride break. We gassed up and then headed south of Big Timber up the 2 lane road to the Natural Bridge. We putzed around there for a while, and I took a bunch of photos. The ride back started off painful – rain drops sprinkling down at 80mph make me want a full face helmet for the next road trip. We managed to outrun the rain, and near Columbus we actually overran Landon’s dad and brother. We played a nice game of ‘how fast can we go?’, with us hammering down the highway well into the triple digits. It was also the first time I have had the throttle pegged in 5th gear. Nothing like 30 miles in a little over 15 minutes Landon’s dad put all us HD guys to shame with the BMW bike — he blew by me doing 110 like I was standing still. Humbling.

I’ve added some new photos to the gallery

• Melanie’s college graduation party
• Cades Cove
• Few random photos in the friends section.

I have also taken the time to finally reorder a few albums to reflect current situations…

A much belated post. I’m a lazy bugger, I know.

So Easter. The long and the short:

• All of us (the kids, silly) piled up to Mom’s house for ‘brunch’. The girls both had the boyfriends there, so it was not the usual single male event. Both Jeff and John (Jon?) are great guys — they’d have to be to date my sisters. Since they are such nice guys, I suppose I will have to feel bad if I need to kill them at somepoint. =D
  • Mom’s brunch is not the light-on-the-stomach meal you might think it should be. Noooo sir! We had french toast, egg bake, carmel rolls, some sort of friend meat, lets call it bacon. Oh yes, and mimosas
  • I also brought Bogart up to Mom’s. I think we’ve finally found someone to equal Rebekkah’s energy. They were both quite pooped after playing all day.
• We wrapped up the day with dinner here at my place. I made the usual (and Melanie’s favorite!) ham and scalloped potatoes. yummy!

My butt is oscillating between numb and really painfull. You needed that info, no? This week has been quite busy, as the whole of TSP5, now named the ‘Koala Team’, met in Boston for our project launch. I could bore you with the gruesome details, but suffice to say that it was a lot of fun working in the same room with those guys. We also have a new manager – like a real trained for managment of a team of engineers. Woot!

The best part was probably getting to hang out with Liza for a couple of nights. We had drinks & food and tried to do a ton of catching up. We both were a little punch drunk from work, but it was great nonetheless. I am looking forward to trying to stay in better touch with her…if only I did not say that everytime.

Ok — off to doze for a bit before my flight boards…

So… I’ve made my first annoying ‘who the heck is this Nic guy’ post on a blog. Granted we are both members of the infamous drunken posse, so hopefully that will lessen the confusion.

At any rate, for those of you playing the at-home game: this is february � logo game

Now this is what I call a weekend! So, where to start…. I think it started Friday, ahh yes, Friday. Kris gave me a call and convinced me to head to Planet Lockwood with him. You know, that man gets me into more fun or trouble — I guess that is what best friends are for ? For those of you who don’t know, Planet Lockwood is one of those fine establishments that allows men with money to see girls with no clothes. sniff Ahh, the smell of captialism….and cheap perfume. I think it is official now, the cost of living in Montana is much lower. I have been to a few of these ‘Gentlemens Clubs’ (what a misnomer that is) in Philly and Jersey, and I have to say that the girls work harder here for a dollar than I’ve ever seen. Kris tossed a few dollars on the bar in front of me, and the girls would of course come over and use creative methods to scoop up the dollars, sometimes after strategically placing those bills on your person. I’m not one who goes to get all worked up in a lather by the girls — I enjoy more the whole scene, sometimes it is just down right hillarious. The trick is to remember — they don’t really like you, and in NO circumstances (well, at least not for less than a grand) are they going home with you….not that you’d really like to do that.

We continued to the “Anything for a dollar” theme from last night , and headed to BullWhackers to hook up with the rest of the crew and do some liver damage. Lucky me, they had Fat Tire on special for a dollar. As usual, I proceeded to drink lots — it is a fun thing to do you know! The best part was that Kris picked me up, so I had none of the usual driving worries to slow my consumption. We had the requrisite blast, spiced up by seeing the fruits of Mary’s visit to the piercing shop, very nice. Thanks to Chad for the lift home.

Saturday night was a bit calmer, and unfortunately was not a continuation of the dollar drink specials. I hit King’s Korner for a few games of pool with K &C, Troy, Sam and Bill. It was then onto the Red Door. It is amazing how good some of those karaoke singers are. Kris, Christy & I took off around midnight and crashed at my place — their house is a bit stanky after refinishing their tub. The fireplace got used again, and Tivo was her usual great self.

All in all, a nice lecherous weekend. Tuesday I will have to return to the guise of a nice dependable software engineer. I have to mention, it has been sometime since I’ve had this many friends to go out and party with. It is soooo nice.

So, I have finally broken down and let The Man put it to me for a gym membership. The good news is that I will be working towards a very svelte Nic. Photos to scare the women and children soon! Kris has remained good enough to drag my butt towards said gym. Sometimes you just need a bit of motivation. I have taken it upon myself to start eating better to help this effort, so I will actually be cooking more and hitting Wendy’s less.

Melanie called me while I was at the grocery store, and it turns out it was Travis Gs barfday. The plan was to hit the Wild West (oh how I hate that place, let me count the metric assloads of cigarette smoke in the air…) for a couple of drinks and make an early night of it. Riiiiight. They were having a $1 USD special on Crown Royal drinks. Let the party begin! I had a few (ok, a few doubles, but who is counting) and had quite a good time.

It has been sooo long since I’ve gotten toasty on a Thursday night. I can’t help but remember the years of ol’ White Dog. Wow did we kill a lot of pitchers there, enough that someone named her cat after the beer we always drank. And no it was not “Bud”, we drank real beer. Following that link might shed some light on the naming of my group of friends too.

Ahh yes, good old bourbon. I belive Shakespeare said it best: “It stimulates the desire, but hinders the performance”. I’m pretty sure the gate keeper was refrerring to getting ones winky wet, but I think it applies to anything — driving, speaking, not peeing on ones shoes, not peeing on other peoples shoes, etc.

So — Friday night was Matt’s birthday and Mandy threw him a surprise party down at the shop. Kris, Christy, Sam and I hit the Circle for some good spongein’ and then the liquor store next door for the nights refreshment. I was feeling frisky, so I splurged for a bottle of Maker’s Mark. I think the last time I had this was drinking at the Union League on someone elses tab. The party was pretty fun and I ended up drinking half the bottle. Yeah, whoops. One of these days I am going to realize that drinking continuously for 6 hours does make one VERY drunk.

It has been a pretty busy week at work — 2 of the 3 QA folks are doing final verification testing on a large deliverable for Cray, so I’ve been trying to hold down the fort for regular testing. I am quite looking forward to getting a few beers in me, and just relaxing.

On the pet front, I have settled on getting a Border Collie. I am going to be scouring the area for a good breeder and go from there. Now I have to start figuring out how to train it. Weee!

Not much else going on — just pooped. I hope everyone has a fantastic weekend!

Oh wait! There is more! Ha!

So — In case you did not know, I am playing on a volleyball team at the local YMCA (Rec B league). I was pretty rusty to start, but thanks to Kris, Jenny, and Troy, I’ve managed to get back into the swing of things. I even managed to get up and finally hit a good spike or two the last game. Of course I am still blocking a few, but we video taped the last game, so I should be able to refine my TigerStyle.

As random chance would have it, one of the girls on the opposing team was someone I knew in high school. Stephanie Heleckson? Hellgeson? At any rate, it was fun to catch up with her. So starts the efforts of finding cool girls here to be friends with — lord knows my friends are not helping in that category. After the game we (the team, silly) headed to Tiny’s for a few beers. I ended up chillin’ with Kara after Sam, Christy, and Kris took off and chugging a few more Schoonies. It was quite nice getting to chat with her — turns out she is pretty damn cool. Good times, good times.

So! It was finally time to have a house warming party at my new place. Pictures, sadly but a few, are up.

First up on the parade of details – Food:

• Roasted Garlic
• Southwestern Rubbed London Broil
• BBQ Pulled Pork
• Spinich Dip (Melanie)
• 7 layer Taco Dip (Mom)
• Assorted Chips, bread and soda

Honorable Mention to Melanie, Koeltzer, Mandy, Kris & Christy for helping out with rubble duty and cleaning.

As it turned out, there were oh, I suppose 30 people here over the coarse of the night. I have to say it was a freaking blast. I got to see almost everyone in Billings I know at one place. It was very nice to have a place large enough and setup to have that many people — not once did it feel overcrowded. I look forward to doing this again this summer, perhaps for some wicked BBQing. Hrm – the driveway is definately large enough for an inflatable pool.

Everyone seemed to have a good time, especially once we busted out Brooke’s gift of Beer Checkers:

Now for the usual bullet list of fun:

• Amount, in square inches, of counter space left open after beer cases were set down: 0
• Number of Full Moon cell phone picutres taken on Melanie’s phone against her wishes: 2
• People who fired up my Harley just for fun: 6
• Approximate start and ending times: 6.30pm and 5.30am
• Overnight guests: 3
• Number of welcome (and planned) overnight guests: 2
• Bags of beer cans, bottles and cardboard cases tossed out: at least 8, you freaking booze hounds
• Amount of food left at 9pm: 75%
• Amount of food left at 2am: 5% . Drunk people get the munchies too.
• Gifts recieved: 4 – Beer Checkers, Candles, Oriental Dragon statuette, Lambic Beer
• Tours of the house give: too god damn many, that is for sure. Next time it is “Hi, glad to see you; Can I take your coat? Make yourselft at home – hey leave the pants on, for godssake”