Aug 22, 2011

I spent most of the day inside, but when I did go out to get the mail I found that I had finally received my degree from Rowan. Very exciting. I put it in its little book that they gave us on graduation day, sent a picture to my mom, and then put it down.

Later I went to the high school courts with Ryan for a few games. They just finished refinishing the whole court. It's now orange and blue, but more importantly, they replaced all the nets so it's all fresh. We had some really good games. We went for a quick run around the pond after our game and talked before leaving.

I went over to Applebee's with Chuck, Jeff, and Matt for karaoke night. We listened to some pretty bad renditions of songs followed by some really good singers. We spent most of the night talking about doing a song, then another half hour looking through the list of what they had, and then we finally got up and sang "Tearin' Up My Heart" by NSYNC. It was a lot of fun.

After we finished the song we were already planning on what we could sing next week. I came home and felt like going out for a run so I took a two mile jog around the neighborhood before coming back to watch Scrubs and go to bed.

Aug 21, 2011

I went to Sarah's house in the morning to help her and Ken move out of their house. We had to make a few trips between there and my mom's house with the truck and her van. Aiden helped out by keeping me entertained. There weren't a lot of heavy things at all; it was just a lot of little stuff. Getting it into the other house was the real challenge.

After I came home and met up with Chuck, we met Alex, Jeff, and Sam at the Pop Shop for dinner. I had decided before we came that I was getting the vegan cheese steak. I did just that. It was wonderful. It was Sundae Sunday or something so Chuck and I split a Candy Shop Sundae with a bunch of candies in it to the amusement of everyone else.

We came back to my house sans Sam and Jordan joined us with the game Pictureka. Most of us had never played before. It was a fun game where you have to find pictures among a jumble of cartoons on the boards. And there are twists and such. It's fun to play while drinking.

The game was going pretty well and the conversation slowly devolved into us talking about what was annoying about each other and then we got into a religious debate/discussion for about two hours. This was not the plan at all, but it was interesting and informative.

After the long, long talk we hugged it out and called it a night. Good game.

Aug 20, 2011

I left early and got to the bus stop in Cherry Hill at sunrise. I had to wait a short time before the Bolt Bus arrived and I slid my bike into a compartment all by itself and we took off for New York. I got through about fifty pages of Into Thin Air as we traveled.

Nathan met me at the bus stop on 34th and we rode off in search of a Jamba Juice and a bike shop. Once we found both (and I had my breakfast acai topper) we got on the bike path along the West Side Highway.

The trail is long and gloriously unobstructed by roads for the most part. The view is quite nice also when it opens up to the river. There were a lot of people out on a beautiful morning zipping up and down the lanes, though never really creating any kind of traffic or annoyance.

We stopped under the George Washington Bridge to check out the lighthouse that neither of us ever knew was there and check out the view. While there, I accidentally knocked another guy's bike down, immediately apologizing with a red face for being so stupid. He gave me a look at first, but then laughed it off and told me not to worry about it.

We had to zig zag through the Bronx before finding the entrance to the pedestrian walkway on the GW. The lanes were nice and wide until we had to go around the standing beams; there they were narrow and awkward and almost always had someone coming around the corner in the other direction as we were rounding them.

Back in New Jersey for a short time, we biked on the road, along with tons of other cyclists. They were everywhere, flying past us even though we were moving at a good speed for most of the time. We followed the Palisades Trail, crossing into New York on undulating hills.

At the bottom of a particularly long, somewhat steep, and very fun hill, Nathan got a flat tire, screaming out to me as I was probably 200 yards ahead. I came back, unable to really help as he changed his tube. I enlisted the help of a passing cyclist who looked like he knew what he was doing. After he asked another guy he knew for help and we watched them inflate the tire for what seemed like a half hour, we were back up and running.

The bike trail is marked nicely with a little cycle and a route number. We followed this into Nyack, where we stopped for lunch at a deli. I had a good tuna sandwich with jalapenos, we rested and then turned around and headed back. The hills were mostly uphill on the way back and caused us to get off and walked them several times. I got used to my gears a bit better though.

We made it back into New York before Nathan's tired went flat again for some reason. He hopped on the subway with his bike and I rode the thirty-some blocks down to George Keeley's bar where he met me and we got some much-desired beers. We sat there, had some free popcorn and relaxed for a few hours.

I caught my Bolt Bus back home, almost went out, then ended up spending the night at home. It was a good and tiring day of riding.

Aug 19, 2011

I went back to the church in the morning to take some more overall shots of the decorations inside and then the grand finale events. First, the representatives for the girls' and boys' teams were brought up to see which group raised more money for the Haitian charity. The girls won so the guy got a pie in the face. The girl did too eventually. It was all good fun.

The actual last event was a "rocket launch" involving five bottles of soda and kids adding Mentos to them. It was cool to watch and a lot of fun to shoot. I got some great photos of the exploding soda and the running kids. There was a model rocket launch after that which took several attempts to get right and wasn't very good photo op anyway.

I came home and spent the afternoon going through the shots I took and then considered going out but made plans to leave very early the next morning instead. I got to bed quite early and was actually able to fall asleep for once!

Aug 18, 2011

The weather looked questionable in the morning, but I decided to take my chances and headed for Philly. I parked in Camden under beautiful blue skies and started biking across the Ben Franklin Bridge. This is the first time I've biked all the way across.

Once in the city I headed straight to the Troc, where I bought Bayside tickets as they went on sale. After that I hit the TLA, AKA Records to get tickets for the Barbary, and finally, the Electric Factory box office. Once I had a bag full of tickets, I headed out for a real bike ride.

I went to the Schuykill River Trail that starts behind the art museum in Fairmount Park. The trail stretches along the river for a long while, going all the way to Valley Forge. I planned to take the twenty mile trip, but the trail becomes confusing and the signage, while good along the single trail on the river, is very poor for turns.

I ended up taking the Wissahickon Trail to the end near Kelly Drive. It was a nice ride overall, but I wish the signs were set up a lot better for directions. I rode back through town, had to stop at the Factory again to grab one more ticket and then headed over the bridge, much slower this time, as it started to thunder. It never started to rain so I met Ryan later for a run at the course where I ran around twice and he did once with 100 Marine squats, which took about the same amount of time.

Chuck and I went up to Landmark to meet people for Laura's birthday celebration. We sat at a table with about 8 people though it was made for 4. We took a bunch of pictures, as we do every time and had some tall Blue Moons. We also started holding up the peace sign to flag our waitress down. Garcon!

Chuck and I enjoyed our beer in the corner as Jess threw various objects at us and we returned the favor. It may have been the three Red Bull drinks she had. Brian was also there so we got to hang out one last time before he went off to Korea!

Shots were also on special so we got a round of Swedish Fish shots. They were quite accurate in the taste. They had quite a few more shots. We just had the one and stuck with beer. It started getting confusing because they got the tab two or three times just to check how much it was. Not a bad idea, but I kept thinking we were leaving.

This blurry pictures explains most of the time in The Spot. We danced in there for the remainder of the night. It was funny for the most part. I liked the DJ though. Drunk Chuck is always fun in the club.

Once the lights came on we were cast out into the pouring rain. We said our goodbyes and walked the several blocks back to where we parked. Chuck took cover under a stranger's umbrella for a few minutes, unbeknownst to them. I just got wet. It felt good. Fun night. Happy birthday, Laura!

Aug 17, 2011

I got up to play tennis with my dad at the college. It was a warm day, but nice for a game. I forgot how good he was. He had me running a lot. I haven't had to work that hard in tennis for a long time. He won both games, but they were close at 5-7 and 4-6. It was a lot of fun.

After I showered and had some food Chuck and I headed up to Rowan to get our podcast started. We did some planning on the setup of the room and the scenes we'd be filming. We came up with some good ideas; namely, just wing it.

We filmed probably an hour's worth of footage. We just did a lot of talking, filmed some intros to the show, and shot some cut scenes that we'll be using. We wanted to shoot our first guest but had some "technical difficulties" with that so it will have to wait. I think we have some good stuff either way.

We went through all the footage after and made sure we would be able to edit it easily with the programs we have access to. It looks like it will work out well. We just need to get the rest of the first episode footage shot and then we can begin the editing process.

We did Quizzo at Applebee's to save us from driving up to PJ's. Some of the questions were actually somewhat difficult. The DJ is still terrible and annoying at times, but at least there was a little bit of a challenge.

We did end up winning! The last round won it for us, I think. We were given 10 cities that we had to spell correctly. We had some trouble with a few, but got 9 out of 10 correct! Cincinnati got us. Someone disputed the spelling of Juneau, Alaska. The DJ actually announced that there were something like four correct spellings for it... uhh.

I had a victory margarita before we left and then came home to watch Rescue Me and Scrubs before bed.

Aug 16, 2011

I went to my mom's church in the morning to document the summer camp festivities they had going on. There were stations set up where the different age groups would rotate throughout the day. They played games in the chapel and learned to sing songs.

I had fun shooting the kids playing with the bubbles. I think they were just fun and interesting shots. Not to mention there was actually good lighting in this part of the church. The lighting was the most difficult thing to deal with since the theme was "outer space" and a lot of the lights were low.

I saw Natalie for the first time in probably two years. She was working the science lab downstairs, of course. The kids in there all seemed really interested and the experiment were cool. I shot things all over for a few hours and then the kids started getting picked up.

While I was nearby I went to Randy's to get my bike rack. We had to try a couple of them before finding the one that fit my car. I didn't have my bike to try it out, but it fit my trunk well enough for me to not worry about it.

Later I met Christy at the courts for a short-lived game of tennis. She clearly was not feeling it.

We went to the Deptford Mall so I could look for a new lip ring that I did not find and then got some nachos. I had a mango lemonade that was pretty awesome from the same place. We went back to the park after that to get my car and walk around for a short time.

I met Chuck at the Oar House when I got back to town and got an Acme IPA. Erin, whom I haven't seen since my philosophy class three or four semesters ago, came in with a few people and came over to say hi. She sat with us and brought her giant group of birthday people with her.

This strange gnome lady was also there. Chuck was clearly uncomfortable around her. Apparently they were bar hopping and taking the gnome all over the place with them? I don't really know.

One of the guys at the table bought Jolly Rancher shots for everyone. Thanks, strange old guy. We did get to know a few of the people at the table, though it remained me and Chuck for the most part.

Before the night was through, a supposedly homeless man that was sitting alone was offered a seat at our table. He was nice and all, it was just a fun anecdote to mention. We had a good time with an unexpected crowd.