One of my favorites (even though I only did it once), Bring Your Own Big Wheel (BYOBW) is on this Sunday at 5pm. They moved it to Vermont St, on good old Potrero Hill. From the pictures last year on Lombard St, it looked like there were crazy huge crowds! Guess they messed up the foliage a little much and had to move.
Here’s us riding down Vermont St. In a car. After Monkey Bowls at Lingba. Scott frantically keeping us on the road.
I thought about trying to get a pillow fight going in Charlottesville—last year was the first I’d heard of the one in SF. But then I missed Valentine’s Day and figured I’d have to wait till next year. I just learned last week that International Pillow Fight Day is March 22.
So I’m getting together a Pillow Fight in Charlottesville … or trying. Cville is a small city, and I don’t know that many people to spread the word. If you know people here or are members of any sort of group, help me spread the word!
We’re starting a band. Mitch is the founder. Today at Mellow Mushroom we (the collective we) figured out who’s in the band and what we’re all playing. Here’s the list, copied from my napkin.
Names…
BBQ Ran Right Thru Me
Band Practice
Band Jobs
Dan—Guitar Bass
Luke—Slide Guitar / Vocals / Ukelele
Mitch—Guitar / Vocals
A.J.—Drums / Photographer / Lighting / FX
Travis—Skin Flute / Butt Bongos / Guitar / Key-tar
Katie—Guitar
Chano—Trumpet
Patty—Ukelele / Guitar / Vocal / Has recording equipment
*Laura—Passing out orange slices (star because she’s special)
Mike C—Triangle
Garbee—Mike’s Skin Flute
K-bakes—Recorder / Clarinet / Art (i.e. junk & titties) / Jug
Mike L—Guitar / Keys
Dirk—Dancer
Mitch’s undergrad girls—Dancers
Rishi—Token Indian Dancer
Molly O—Guitar / Vocal (lead)
All band members will vote on the band name.
Update 1/18: Found this posted at Marco & Luca. It’s our calling. Must have own transportation!!!
Last Sunday we put couches through our upstairs window. We had to because they wouldn’t fit up the stairs. We tried. Turn them sideways. Take the legs off. Take down the banister. The stairs are just too narrow.
Really? There’s such thing as a house that won’t fit a couch? Yes, there is such a thing.
Why do the couches have to go up the stairs when they’re perfectly fine in the living room? Because we’ve had new ones picked out for the living room, and the old comfy-but-it’s-ok-if-they-get-a-little-ratty-cuz-they-got-beat-up-in-the-move ones were supposed to go upstairs where the new big TV is. But most importantly, because I’m stubborn and wanted to prove that we could get couches upstairs through the window.
Half the neighborhood (well at least five passers-by), attracted by the two 16ft ladders we rented for the occasion, came into the house to convince us that we could get couches up the stairs. Dude, if they would go up the stairs, we would have done it three months ago when we moved in. You think we’re risking our friends’ lives climbing giant ladders before we tried that? But thanks for the concern.
Plan A—a boom lift—costs a good $500, so we went with Plan B: two really big step ladders. Just push the couches up the side of the ladders, prop the top end onto the porch’s roof, and slide them into the window where someone will catch it. Awesome plan.
So we opened the ladders up for the first time. Wow, 16 ft step ladders are way bigger than I thought. Uh…Plan B might not work so well with the 2 yard gap between the top of the ladders and the roof.
If you’ve taken Error Prevention Training, remember when they tell you about saying “This is stupid,” and stopping the operation? Well, this is about when “this is stupid” kicked in. Laura and I said it out loud even. But give up? You’re talking to one of two people that believed we could get all our crap into only two ReloCubes. Did I mention I’m stubborn?
Plan C: Turn the ladders sideways next to each other right up against the house. Result: Again, way too big a footprint—can’t even fit them in front of the house.
Plan D: Stagger them. Result: The front yard is a hill; the second ladder barely keeps from tipping over.
This is stupid.
Plan E: Close one ladder and prop it against the house like an extension ladder. Slide the couches up this one while someone on the open ladder guides it. Laura’s suggestion. We were trying to avoid crushing the gutters, but it was the only option left. Sorry gutter.
Here are the results. We make it look incredibly easy, but really it was incredibly scary. Four people on or under ladders pushing a couch up to the second floor, with four people in the window blindly tugging on ropes attached to the couches … what could possibly go wrong??? Oh yeah, Dan almost getting his head lopped off when the first couch goes tumbling off to the side. Unfortunately we didn’t get a video of that, but here’s a video of the second one. And some pictures.
Thanks to everyone that came to help, even though you all told me afterward that you really just came to be entertained by a failed attempt and didn’t believe for a second that we’d actually get the couches upstairs. As with every other stupid thing we do with friends, we couldn’t have done it without you … and this probably the stupidest thing we’ve done.
Oh and thanks to Strongo who was kind enough to come over Saturday night to show me how to take out the window (i.e. take the window out for us). I would have figured it out, but it would have taken me 6 hours and I would have broken something important.
Nothing too exciting and no profound thoughts recently, I guess…
Wait, something kind of exciting—all of a sudden we’re ranked! Wahoowa!
And James is now a doctor (of the Philosophical persuasion). Congratulations, Dr. James. This man could save your life one day:
We left one set of drunkards that build national security assets for another set of drunkards that will be saving peoples’ lives soon. Work hard play hard.
And a little self indulgence*…some pictures I took of our friends’ Ultimate game (the good guys are in yellow):
A yellow house: a few hundred thousand dollars.
Liquor, beer, mixers, food: a few hundred dollars.
149 candles: a few dollars.
Three worlds colliding, hanging out, flippy cup, flaming volcanoes, waterballoon fights, flaming cakes, bathtub peeing, friends’ random hook ups or semi-hook ups, and a dance party topless (unfortunately only dudes): priceless.
so this might be a terrible idea, but since we always have some sort of “drink dispenser” on our B2B treks, and making a soda fountain would take some serious time and money, what about buying one of these costumes: adult shake costume and putting it over a keg of beer… so we’re dressing up beer as a McD’s milkshake… and wheeling it around in a shopping cart… what size keg fits in a shopping cart? we can always get a child-size shake costume and put it over a pony keg. I think it would be kind of cute. child milkshake costume What do you guys think?
It’s that time of the year again, kids! The fantastic Bay to Breakers “race” across the beautiful city of San Francisco. And holy shmoley it’s only two weeks away. The usual spiel: get those McMaster-Carr orders in, find some shopping carts, start making costumes, start getting ready.
In case you haven’t heard already, our theme this year is:
Fast Food Nation
Be a fast food mascot or anything related to fast food chains and the like. Ronald McDonald, Hamburglar, Grimmace, all those other McDonalds characters, Wendy, Dave Thomas, Two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun (a multi-person costume perhaps, with the Voltron effect??!), the Arby’s oven mitt, Creepy (BK) King, Dan Cortese, milkshakes, soda, high fructose corn syrup, CORN (Big Bird?), fry girls … you get the idea.
Who wants to build carts? You do! You do! Who has ideas for carts? I’m thinking one of them (or both) needs big Golden Arches spinning up high on a PVC pipe so we can find our carts in the crowd. Turning one of them into a drive through has been brought up. One of them could also be a “soda” fountain a la lots-of-tubes-coming-out-of-big-buckets style. Old Man and Luke have graciously donated their garage(?) for cart-building. Well, now they have. I don’t know…call them or something…I live 3000 miles away, so don’t call me.
DC vs SF UI—Overall, I say SF wins. It’s the original. But I can appreciate the fact that 600 people drinking on the street with shopping carts in tow is not acceptable to the DC police. SF cops are way cool about that stuff. I like that all 600 people stay together in the SF version too.
It was still fun—it’s the Urban Iditarod, how could it not be. I was pretty impressed with some of the costumes. The teams do go all out. I think our collective favorites were PacMan, the Pope and Pope’s secret service, and Double Dare. Except that the themes weren’t dog-related. Hello, Urban Iditarod? Here’s our sorry-ass cart:
The Animal Control idea didn’t pan out so well since no other teams were animals. Except one—there was a Zoo team. We stole their animals. They slimed our cart.
Here’s something cool: sabotage is encouraged. I didn’t like the idea at first, but it adds an interesting element of danger to the whole thing. Water balloons and eggs flying through the sky, people sneaking around with duct tape and cable ties, waterguns, vaseline slime. Fun. Apparently there were things hidden around each bar for bonus points too. We were busy figuring out how to enjoy our own beers between running, so no bonus points for us.
Anyway, here are pictures. Wow, there was a lot of squirt bottling going on after the race.
