and the award for laziest blogger on the planet goes to………me.

irma and lj came out for a visit to ol sea-town over the weekend, and we had so much fun. on saturday pops, natey, criss, and i all went out on a salmon fishing trip and it was definitely one of the highlights of the entire summer, and honestly my entire pacific northwest experience thusfar! we all got to land one, and of course dad’s was the biggest - by far, at around 10 pounds. i caught the first one, but in the end it turned out to be the smallest at only about 4 pounds. it was a blast though, and none of us lost one. naturally, that night we feasted on salmon, sashimi-style and grilled until we were in a stupor! it was amazing eating fish that fresh.

in other news, i’m starting a new job soon. i am leaving the world of code-monkey-tech-geekdom for the time being, and trading in my carpel tunnel wrist brace for my skate pads! that’s right, i’m going pro…..sort of. here’s the (long) story:

back in july, i went for a visit to missoula. chico and i rallied over for a krooks reunion show at the badlander. the show was great, packed house, and sweaty rock n roll spewed forth. super fun. jake told me he was going down to ASR, the big skate trade show in San Diego in September, and invited me to come along just for the sake of trouble making. i am, after all edge of the world alumni, and making trouble at trade shows has always been an EOW tradition. i declined, however, as a plane ticket just wasn’t within my budget. jake then countered by buying me a ticket and declaring ‘i guess you have to go now, don’t you!’ indeed, it seemed mandatory.

so i put on my dirtiest pair of jeans and caught a plane to cali. i arrived, but my bag never did. in fact, i didn’t get it back until a week later long after i had already returned to seattle. thank you very much, alaska airlines. anyway, on day 1 of the show i ran into a friend named kate, whom i worked with at snowboard connection. that’s the shop where i found a job upon arriving in seattle last winter. she now works as a snowboard buyer for zumiez, a huge chain of skate/snow shops. she was surprised to see me, and even more surprised that i was in san diego with no particular agenda, other than to hang with 10,000 other skaters. she asked if i or anyone i knew would be interested in a position as skate buyer at zumiez. hell yes i’m interested. so i talked with her and her coworker for a while and they passed on my contact info to the skate dept. guy named zeke. zeke called me and we met for an informal interview the next day. it went great, and we scheduled a formal interview for when we all got back to seattle. on tuesday, 5 interviews in a row later, i was given an offer to be the assistant skate buyer for all of the zumiez chain, which by year’s end will have 350 stores. holy shit. what a great job. i start in a week. i’m so excited to get back in the game, and be involved with what i love the most!

going pro? okay, okay, that was a bit exaggerated. but how about those salmon?

big news back on the eastside: worth and sunday just had their little baby, bella rose grant. anyway, i linked to their blog, where you can follow all the action over there to the right in the folks section.

in my little world, i have recently built up a site for one of the boats on the Discovery Channel’s show “Deadliest Catch”. The official site for the f/v Cornelia Marie is alive and kicking, and has been for a while, actually. Check it out, if you like the show or you just like websites built by the slimsational.

later.

i’ve been working soooooo much, but we went to mount saint helens last weekend and camped and biked. more pics in the just photos and mountain biking galleries. did a sweet ride with 4 huge waterfalls in 4 miles of trail. i’ve been trying to do a full on rebuild of this site as well, and it’s coming along. so it should be up soon…………

Here’s a slick new coding trick….maybe. Click the tourista-esque picture below to see a neat trick.

it seems that spring has sprung here in the pacific northwest. it’s warm, the sun is shining (at least today), cherry trees are blossoming, baseball teams are practicing in the park……….
it’s pretty damn nice, too. not to say that the winter isn’t great, but i didn’t really get to ride a ton this year, and i am looking forward to tree runs of the dirt persuasion and wave rides of the concrete persuasion. ahh yes, summer. gettin wicked, as they say. well, anyway, posting a few pics of spring. these are all from my commute home today. just pictures, that’s all. there a little dark, but not as dark as they would have been on friday.  enjoy.

not much going on. for the last 2 days i’ve been taking pictures of skate shoes at work and putting them on the website. here’s the little sweatshop where the magic happens.
it’s raining and stuff. anyway, here’s a picture of a spot on my way to work. just a little something i see everyday.

so i suck at posting. there it is. i said it. but i’m going to do better. just a short installment of something, anything interesting. maybe just a picture or whatever. anyway, here’s a picture of seattle. that’s where me and criss and the fluff dog live now. seattle. i just got back from montana yesterday, though. on a train. the whole crew from my job here in seattle went together. balooga and frank du jour and bear all live there now. so it totally ruled to ride with those guys.

anyway, i made the galleria a bit easier for everyone to upload pictures into. if you want to put your pics up in it, go for it. any album is yours to invade. you just have to register. this should simplify things a bit. please post, and if you feel a new album needs to be created to house pictures of a certain kind, let me know and it shall be so. later.

yeah, so here’s a pic of MT also. later!

it’s leaf mania up here in the high country. criss’s mom was here for most of the week, and my folks came up today, so we’ve been out and about taking in the fall colors. it’s been really nice, though. went up to roan mtn, beacon heights, hit up bob’s dairyland and got a boss burger - that’s 2 burgers, 2 pieces of cheese, a whole side of bacon, a piece of ham, and to top it off about a quart of mayo. yummy. i got out and skated the other day, so there’s a pic up here and a couple more in the gallery. enjoy.

so, it’s been a busy month. i’ve been spending so much time in front of the computer lately, blogging didn’t seem like the most appealing use of my free time. but, anyway I built a website, so check it out if you want to:

eaglesnestbe.com

Still getting a few kinks worked out, but it’s just about there. so for the last while i’ve been up to the same old business. helen and preston came into town for a few days in between visiting family, hitting up a wedding and turning japanese. they’re taking off for the land of the rising donkey on november 7th. they will now be posting all of their bloggables on sumosake.slimsmind.com for the common voyeur in all of us. i can’t wait to see a picture of how much taller preston is than anyone else on the street. look for it. while they were here we went to twisting falls and hebron rock colony, and there are pics up in the photo dumpster. i also shuttled people up the mountain in an edge of the world bus at the hound ears bouldering comp last sunday, so there are a few pics up from there.
as for me, the most adventurous day i’ve had in a while was out in wilson creek. seems like there’s always something crazy going on out in those woods. went biking with ski, frank day, and ben young a couple weeks ago. we rode a mammoth ride from table rock right down to wilson. started out great, super steep, eveyone going over the handlebars, laughing it up. then we get to the first big climb. ski’s handlebars are all loose, because a bolt is stripped. so we tried to fix it, but no luck, so ski makes the call to keep going down greentown and raiders camp, and just risk it with the single bolt. more on that later. so we take the plunge down greentown hitting up the jumps and having a great time. i hit a pile of steaming hot fresh dog shit on the way down, and my shinguard decides to hold on to the better part of 1 turd for safekeeping (see picture above). then some flings into my eyeball. good thing ski is a paramedic. one aggressive rinse later, ben young is hitting the jumps up again, and decides to fly 50 feet through the air and crash harder than i’ve ever seen. and i’ve seen him crash before. no harm, just a little scraped up. he did more damage to the mountain.

onward we go, i get a flat about 2 minutes down the trail and my bike rag dolls into the creek 15 feet below. another brutal climb and everyone is hurting. that’s when i get us lost. we take a premature turn trying to get on the last trail, raiders camp. next thing you know we’re going down trails, backtracking, going down others……….. you get the picture. we ended up on some farm with no road going in or out of it - we were way back in the mountains. we also found a really cool 200ft waterfall i’ve never seen before. eventually, after pushing our bikes back up the mountain, we found the right trail. everybody is having serious leg cramps at this point. don’t worry it’s only another 7 miles. so we hit up raiders, which is pretty rocky and fast, and this is the perfect spot for ski to break his handlebars right off of his bike. sounds fun, huh? screaming down a mountainside on a bike with your feet trapped in the pedals, with no steering. … he hit his face pretty hard on a rock. right on the jaw. not good. so now ski is carrying his bike overhead and running like a madman down the mountain, and actually keeping up with us. we’re so tired we’re pushing our bikes across flat ground, but finally make it to the truck. i went ahead and flew over the handlabars crossing a creek in site of the truck, to round out my day. great fun. i don’t think i have ever been so fatigued at the end of a day, but it also felt really good.

enough! check out the gallery, there are a bunch of pictures in the regular old blog album and the mountain biking one.

stumpy has been thrown into the blogosphere, here on SLiMSMiND. check out his blog @ stumpy.SLiMSMiND.com

he also threw a bunch of pics up in his album in the gallery, so check em.

sorry, no time to blog this time, just working like crazy to get a site launched, but wanted to give yall a head’s up on stumpy’s blog! see you later. look for the weekend action to be posted on monday. later.