I just got back from spending Saturday night in Princeton, NJ.  The campus is absolutely beautiful there.  I went there with Rob to meet up with our friend Hann-Ah.  Hann-Ah had just helped his sister drive her car over from Chicago, during the day Friday.  So we got to Hann-Ah’s other sister’s home (confusing, I know) around five o’clock on Saturday.  After playing a game or two one the PS2, we ventured out and walked around the Princeton campus.  Two things to note that were blatant to us.  Everyone drives luxury cars there… if you’re looking to buy a luxury car, go to a campus like this to see all of the differences.  Also, what other campus has a Rolex store, a brokerage house, and a store just devoted to women’s makeup on campus? 

Later that night, we went to a brew pub called Triumph Brewery.  They had a small cover band play (heh, I’ll let Rob quote the exact description of them) which was a nice background filler.  The place had a very retro/modern look, but in some way, it was inviting… I’d recommend getting a beer there, if you’re around those parts. 

As a side note, the cicadas are getting louder and louder… I’ll try to post some pictures in the next couple weeks…

If only to just give myself a personal record of when this went down….

I found out, earlier this week, that I have a minor inguinal hernia.  I noticed a small bump in the groin area and had some discomfort, about two weeks ago.  I brushed it off as just pulling a muscle (groin) from running.  Then last Sunday (May 9^th), I was removing some waste from my body and felt a strong pain in the groin area (to the upper left of my cock).  I’m still not quite sure what that pain was specifically, other than being related to the hernia, but it was very uncomfortable and I debated about going into the emergency room.  After talking myself out of it, I laid in bed and massaged the bump until it felt better.  Ok, that just sounds bad…

So, I went to a doctor on Monday (beauty of PatientFirst and no appointments) and the doctor was unsure if I had a hernia, so he referred me to a specialist.  I saw the specialist this past Monday (May 17^th) and he knew just by looking that it was a hernia. 

As I stand, I have surgery scheduled for next Thursday (May 27^th) to fix my little bump.  I went for my physical and blood work yesterday & all was good.  Other than having the hernia, I am in excellent shape, which is surprising considering the large amount of cheese and tortillas that I have been eating lately.  I was told that I can start running again (yep, I’m looking forward to that) after just a few days.  The majority of my recovery is short (about a week or two) and I should expect a full recovery (ability to lift large objects again) within 3 months.  I’ll only be on the narcotics for a couple days, after surgery.  Surprisingly, I was told that I can lift weights before the 3 month deadline since that is a focused activity and it’s not an awkward motion. 

I chose to go with surgery so soon because of two reasons.  I am going to Las Vegas in the middle of June and after talking with the specialist, he made it clear to me that I would be healed by then and much more comfortable.  The other reason is that there is a chance that the bladder can go through the muscle wall and get trapped.  A side-effect of that is that the bladder gets strangulated (loses blood).  If that happens, surgery should be performed as soon as possible to reduce complications.

A nice thing that I found out is that the risk of getting another hernia in the future is only 5%.  The other nice thing as a result of this is that I now know what a hernia is.  I would have rather discovered what it is through some other means, but hey… take ‘em as they come, I guess.

I went to the Preakness this last weekend.  I think it (the infield) is as close to a NASCAR event that I can get, without actually attending one.   The whole day was pretty much one big ass party and really made me feel like it was spring break again.  We got up and got out to the track around 10:00am or so.  That was a perfect time to get there, since we had to wait about 45 minutes in line.  The even coordinators wouldn’t allow metal chairs and basically had to go through every cooler, so it took quite a while for everyone to get in.  We got there with enough time to make a little area for ourselves (and that area got smaller as the day got longer).  Note for the next time, bring rope & tie it around the chairs/objects that make up your area.  That way, it’s less likely that you’ll lose a chair or space for sitting.

So there were 12 races total, with the main event last.  You can bet on any race that you want, but you have to follow strict guidelines to do so.  Buying a program for $3 was well worth it, as it went over all of the horses and the rules for betting.  Other than that, pretty much anything went.  Beer was the choice drink among people, since bottles were not allowed.  Surprisingly, they had no problems with people bringing in beer bongs, slip & slides, and even inflatable pools.  As an added bonus, there were girls who were willing to show their assets, every so often.  Oh, and the girls… so many beautiful girls wearing little else than a short skirt and a bikini top.  Like I said, it reminded me quite a bit of spring break.

Other than that, drinking pretty much began around 11:00am and continued till about 7:30 or 8… I would recommend that you bring food, snacks, and your own beer for this event.  They sold things there, but the prices were quite high, from what I remember.  Anyway, it was just starting to get dark out, as I walked home.  Yep, I decided that the best way for me to get home was to walk the 4-6 miles… by myself… carrying two chairs… Along the way, I made some friends, got some numbers and managed to forget what the people looked like and the conversations had.  Ah well, there’s always next year.

The porta potti situation at the track was pretty decent.  As long as you made an effort to go towards the center of one of the 5 rows of toilets, the lines were usually short and painless.  Unfortunately, each porta potti was like its own little oven.  Couple that with the shit smell and the occasional puke splatter made for some very unattractive experiences.  I’ve heard that the last 3 years it has rained.  This might have been better to reduce the humidity, but I kind of liked getting burnt.

Anyway, I’ll post pictures when I can scan them.  Yep, I gave in and got a disposable… I figure documenting events like this with some pictures is better than none.  Also, DON”T get a picture disk from Kodak.  I though I’d get a CD with decent quality scans… I got a 3.5mm with shitty quality JPGs…

I have opened a (one of many?) Pandora’s Box…  The one that I led myself through was love.  I opened my world up and with that came all sorts of the joy and happiness.  I have been going through the opposite for longer than I want to, lately…  Now, don’t get me wrong… the joy and happiness outweigh the misery come-down many times over, but I feel like the depression of winter has not yet been lifted from me.  Each year, I feel as though winter slowly shuts me down and I generally feel depressed (most of the time without knowing it).  Towards spring and summer, I start feeling more alive and come out of the “darkness” of depression.  It’s possible that I’ve just been in a general state of depression for about the last year or so, though. 

Being away from so many people who cared about me, how I felt, what I was doing, what I was going to do, etc probably made my feelings that much more intense.  The positive thing that I’ve gotten out of being away from everyone, is that I now have a strong feeling of what I want in the coming years of life.  I can’t say that I want this for the rest of my life (but hey, why not), but for the next 10 to 30 years or so, it seems like the right path to take.

I have decided that love (be it from a lover or from just close friends) is many times more valuable than any money, job, or “way of life.”  It has taken me quite a long time to get to this decision, even though I heard other people talk about it daily.  I really don’t think that I listened to those people and, as many before, thought that with money came joy.  Now, I’m not saying that I’m rich or that I don’t want to be.  I know I will be… I’m just saying that my drive has shifted to wanting to be around those who care.  To go through this life without having someone there to share experiences with seems like a waste to me.  If you have more money than you know what to do with, then what?  Most people in that position try to get a little more… to try to out do themselves.  To me, they’re missing more than they know and probably avoiding something more illusive.

So, I think from now on, I’m going to do things that only make me (and as a side effect, possibly those around me) happy.  I figure that if I do that, the money will follow… I’m not worried in the least about having money or meeting someone else’s expectations, so I might enjoy my days… I would just rather have money take a backseat to joy/happiness for once.  I suppose I’ll be labeled a terrorist for this sort of thought, now 😉

I wanted to finish up the overview of my glass blowing experience before going on and teaching myself the Star Spangled Banner guitar version… I’m really itching to go play around, so this might be somewhat rushed… anyway, on with it:

I decided that Saturday night would be a good night to go out to an Irish pub and down some tasty brew.  I think the downfall was the bit of whiskey that I had before going out… There was a pretty good Irish band that played at the bar that I went to.  Anyway, after a bunch of Resurrection beers, I woke up the following day with a handy headache.  I had to be at the studio around 9am, so I popped some aspirin, drank a glass of water and rushed out of the door.  I made it to the studio right at 9 and Ragan and Gayla went over their shpeal on adding color to the glass.  The cool part is that I was able to drink out of one of the tumblers that I made the previous day.  Back to the color; basically they have 3 types of color type material that they use.  The first is the powdery colored glass that we used on our paperweights.  Another option was strips/strings of colored glass.  The final type was a solid glass bar (about 2 inches thick) that they shave pieces off (using a diamond saw)… they use those shaved pieces to create solid color for plates, etc.  I then asked Ragan how Heineken (not really sure why beer was on my mind) colored their bottles green, and she basically reaffirmed my initial thought that they just add dye/color to the vat of molten glass.

So, I started the day by making a bowl… I was hungry and thought that I’d like a cereal bowl that was big and deep.  So I did 3 gathers for the bowl and decided that I should make it a blue/white type bowl.  I was still feeling pretty hung-over and thought that it was harder to make this thing, than the day before.  But once again Ragan was an excellent help and guided me through the process. 

After that, Ragan did a demo on how to make a dish with curvy edges on it.  I remember that my Mom had a similar type dish that she used to house a candle and some beads.  Anyway, it was really cool.  Basically they make a bowl, but instead of finishing the bowl with straight sides, they put it back in the glory hole and spun it.  When the bowl was put in the glory hole, they heated it up until the sides of the bowl started flopping (yep… that’s the term).  At that point, they spun the rod so that the centripetal force would spread the bowls edges outward.  At this point, it looked like it was taking on the shape of a plate.  Ragan took the piece out of the glory hole and made the pipe vertical with the glass object on the bottom… she continued to spin the piece while letting it stop and rest occasionally.  Each time that she stopped, the walls of the object would curl back down towards the floor.  After it got to the desired circumference, it had pretty much cooled enough where she didn’t need to spin it anymore.  She was then able to sit down on the bench and complete it.  It was really an amazing process to see done.

After seeing that, I chose to do a dish like that.  I figure that I can store some candy in it or something.  Again, the process was much harder to do in person than just watching, but it was quite an amazing experience.  While I did the bowl and candy dish, Michael, one of the other students (took the class with his Wife Natalie) decided to create two carafes.  The first carafe that he created was pretty tiny and will probably only hold a half bottle of wine at most.  He decided to make it clear, maybe to see the wine?  The second one, though, was spectacular.  He added some colors to it and made it quite a bit bigger.  His process was instead of creating the initial jack line, he pulled the glass to create the stem of his carafe.  It took about 3 firings in the glory hole to make the steam as long as he needed.  They then created a jack line and put the object back in the glory hole to warm it up to do the base.  For the base, Ragan and Gayla decided that it would work out better if he stood on top of the bench and used gravity.  So Michael climbed up on the bench and used a wooden paddle, on the floor, to make the base more flat and wide. After that, they stuck the punt (small piece of glass) on the base and transferred the object to the punty.  At that point, they used the jacks to widen the mouth/stem of his object.  All in all, it turned out really well.

For my final piece, I had a choice of pretty much anything.  I’m not sure why I didn’t go with a carafe, but maybe I’ll do one next time.  I could have done paperweights and Christmas ornaments if I wanted, but I chose to go with another bowl.  I figured that if one broke, I’d still have another to eat out of 🙂  Anyway, I went with red, black and white as my colors for this bowl and it turned out looking quite good, if I do say so myself. 

Looking back, this experience was great.  I would definitely recommend learning to blow glass to anyone.  If you’re in the Baltimore area, look up Corradetti Studio and have some fun.  Ragan and Gayla were excellent tutors and I wish them all the luck with their own endeavors.  Also, I was told that most of the hobbyist glass blowers use Pyrex as their glass of choice, since you can use a torch to shape it and it is very resilient to temperature changes.  I don’t think it requires an annealing oven (used to cool the glass slowly) either.  I’ll post pictures of my pieces when I pick them up (they needed to cool in the annealing oven overnight).

If you’re interested in seeing what Ragan is capable of, she has a studio at:

3500 Parkdale Avenue
Suite 24
Baltimore, MD 21211
410.554.6020

I had my first of two days at Corradetti Studio’s glass blowing workshop.  I researched glass blowing before, and chose to go with a weekend course offered by Corradetti.  There are 4 total students (including me) in the class and we have two instructors.  The two instructors are apprentices, I think, for Anthony.  Reagan was the name of one instructor, and I forget the name of the other… Apparently Reagan has about 10 years of experience blowing glass, and she has been a lot of fun to work with so far.  The other instructor has about 3 years of experience and still considers herself as a beginner.  She is just as great and both seem to work really well together. 

The day started out with the girls going through safety procedures.  Basically, they wanted to drill into our heads that the metal rods and molten glass are very hot.  They then went around the studio pointing out various pieces of equipment and described the uses for each.  After that, Reagan gave a demonstration for how to make a glass (similar to a pint glass).  I have to say that blowing glass looks MUCH easier than it is in person 🙂

After Reagan was done with the initial demonstration, it was then time to split up in groups of two and start working.  We split up so that there would be an instructor working with one person at a time.  So while two people were working, the other two watched and helped out when needed.  In total, we made 3 objects today.  I made two glasses and a paper weight.  Doing the paperweight was easier and a little more fun than the glasses.  We were able to embed colors into the piece, and as a bonus, I finally got to see how the bubbles are put in glass paperweights, etc.  I do have to admit that making the glasses really gave me an appreciation for custom glass work.  Now I can understand how artists can charge the ridiculous prices for pieces.

Tomorrow, it looks like I’ll be making myself a new cereal bowl among other things… we’ll also be able to use color in all of the pieces, I believe.  Anyway, I’ll write about how it was after it’s a memory.

This weekend was busy with fun.  Before the weekend, though, I decided that the best course of action was to work 4 10-hour days last week.  This enabled me to take Friday off without loss of wages/time devoted towards work projects.  So what to do on my day off, you ask… well, I naturally went to a costume store and picked up three costumes (a gorilla, penguin, and rooster).  I then proceeded to BWI to pickup a good friend and his girlfriend.  They had flown in from Milwaukee, for this specific weekend.  I do admit that I was about 15-20 minutes behind schedule at this point, but some things are out of my hands… I got out of my bed as soon as the coast was clear. 

So… Josh, Berry, and I continued the expedition as we drove to Washington DC.  Apparently, I decided that Mapquest directions would be sufficient and decided not to bring another map of any kind.  Note, I only printed the written directions, not the little maps.  We drove from BWI around DC, via 295, and continued into Virginia.  At the point of driving over a drawbridge, we were able to look across a lake/river and see the Washington monument (expected destination) in the distance.  Being quite the navigator, I figured that we would be better off taking the city streets rather than turning around and catching the correct exit from 295.  We hopped on a street and drove in the direction of the monument.  At one of the intersections, we got directions from a VERY nice man driving a flower truck.  If I remembered the company name, I would make note, but that has long left my memory.  Anyway, the guy said that we were going in the right direction and only needed to find the 14^th street bridge to cross back over the river and get towards the capital, etc.  After missing that bridge and finding another, we eventually made it to the hotel to drop off all of our stuff.  By the time we got into costumes and started walking towards the capital, it was around 1:30-2:00.  Josh and I decided that it was best to just wear the costumes as we walked from 14^th & M to the capital building.  Along the way, we stopped at a local flower shop to pickup a dozen roses.  By the time we got about 2 blocks away from the capital, we put on the large heads so that we were in full costume.  I have to admit that the majority of locals seemed to take the sight of a penguin and gorilla walking down the sidewalk as an everyday occurrence.  A few people laughed and pointed, but the majority just continued on like it was normal.

Once we reached the capital area, we were surrounded by people who wanted to take pictures of us in our suits.  I think we gave the Whitehouse some solid competition for photographs.  Anyway, at that point, we met up with Gwen & Ben (they live in California now, but we met originally in Milwaukee).  Gwen proceeded to put on the rooster costume and called Rachel.  While she was talking to Rachel, I called Rob and found out that they were sitting by the reflection pool near the Washington monument side.  The call from Gwen was a pre-planned call to distract Rachel from realizing that Rob was talking to me.  So, we all started walking in the direction of the reflection pool.  Along the way, we had a little boy (4-5 years old maybe) walk about 2 blocks with us, cause he thought we were really cool.  Josh was asked to jump on someone’s back, for a picture… and generally, we got a great response from people and found ourselves in many pictures.  Heh, I tried to give a flower to a little girl (maybe 3); and she saw a flap on the suit.  She said something like “That’s not a real penguin, there’s a person inside.”  At that point, I gave up on giving her the flower and just waved and walked away.  I did find a girl to give the flower to, but she was more my age and pretty to boot… anyway, that was to make it look like we weren’t heading straight for Rob & Rachel.

We did come to them, and Josh handed Rob a flower.  It was sort of a weird silence and then Gwen asked for $2 for the flower to sort of break the tension.  At that point, Rob started his speech and reached into his vest pocket.  He pulled out the ring and got down on his knee.  He then proceeded to ask Rachel to marry him, with a small crowd of people (walking along the reflection pool & path) and the three of us right by the blanket.  Berry and Ben were hiding behind a tree watching it all unfold.  Rachel started crying and accepted and at that point, Rob told us that it was a good time to take off the costume heads.  I think people at the capital could have heard Rachel scream in excitement when she realized that her best friend and other great friends were there to experience it all with her. 

After all of that, we hung out in DC for the night and the next day.  To sort of sum up how the night evolved, it involved drunk walking some of the streets by the hotel, after bar time, with Josh.  Heh… we were even approached by a girl (in her car) to see if we were looking for some $100 action.  She was very pretty, but that’s just not me… both of us really aren’t sure why we decided to walk around, but there were probably better things that we could have been doing at that point (like drinking water or sleeping!). The weather was beautiful both days (around 80+ degrees and sunny).  All in all, I don’t think that it could have worked out better.  We all came back and went out in Baltimore on Saturday night.  Josh and Berry then had (probably a very interesting/drunken flight) at 6:00am on Sunday morning.  I know that Josh stayed up till the cab came around 5:30, so that was probably an evil flight for him.  Ben and Gwen left today around 6:00pm.

This all made for quite a fun weekend and a definitely memorable experience.  I wish both of them the best and want to thank them for allowing me to be a part of it all.  There were some pictures of our own that were taken, and once I get those from Josh, I’ll post them on this site.  So, if you happen across Rob, wish him the best!