Back to Chicago...

I get back to Chicago at 9:00 PM tonight and I will be there until Decmber 29. I don't really have any plans so I am looking to party. TG? Will you be around this week? Salvador? Rodaniel? Ed Wood? I'll be calling on you guys to George Dutch Chuuch it out.

Don't tell my parents but I got them a Roomba for Christmas/Channukah. I had heard of the Roomba before but my little league baseball coach whom I saw at my sister's wedding sang it's praises. It appears that the Roomba will not only vaccuum your house on its own but you could program it to do it once a day/once a week/whenever you want and when its finished it will park itself back on its charger. The only thing it won't do is climb stairs. I'm thinking about naming it Ben Stigler and making it clean my rug if you know what I mean.

RIAA X-Mas Party

Last night was the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Christmas party. It's always the best party in town because they rent out the 9:30 Club which is a small venue and they bring an "up and coming" act to perform for a couple hours and of course, its open bar. The musical guest this year was INTRICATE ODE...just kidding Salvy, it was the Chi-City rapper named Common backed up by Grandmaster Flash. The show was great and the unlimited Miller Lites made me dance like a Stigler. Nothing really crazy happened other than my buddy Roger getting molested on the dance floor by a gigantic black woman. She was standing behind him and had her hands down the front of his pants. It was great. I blacked out and woke up with a bag of teriyaki flavored beef jerky in my bed and still wearing the clothes i had on the night before. Thursday is the new Friday. I take it easy on weekends and party balls during the week.

Anybody gonna be in Chi-City over X-Mas? I fly in on the 21st and return to DC on the 29th. Salvador? Are gonna be in Iowa? Maybe I'll make a trip to Thrillwaukee if Doug and Stiggs will be around.

Park City is Insane!

Last weekend one of my buddies was planning a ski retreat to Park City, Utah for the Congressman he works for and he asked me if I would be willing to staff the Congressman and his guests all expenses paid. I graciously accepted and we hopped on a flight to Salt Lake City Friday afternoon.

We toured Olympic park and were able to ride the Olympic bobsled track. Our driver was none other than Pat Brown, the coach of the Jamaican bobsled team who John Candy portrayed in the film "Cool Runnings". Much to my surprise, Pat Brown was not big and fat but rather short and stocky and very quiet. My sled finished with a top speed of 81 MPH and a time of 52 seconds and some change. It was the most frightening thing I have ever done in my life and the bruises on my arms are a testament to that.

After bobsleding we decided that we wanted to learn how to snowboard but instead of paying for a lesson we thought we could learn on our own. Big mistake. I fell so many times it took me almost 2 hours to reach the bottom of the mountain. It's not as easy as it looks. In one instance I somehow manuevered myself into an ungroomed portion of a run that I had no business being on. After I wiped out in waist deep powder I realized that I couldn't get up and the more I struggled the deeper I sunk into the snow drift. One of my friends yelled at me to unclip my boots from the board and climb out of the snow drift. It seemed like a good idea until I pulled my legs free of the devil board and it took off on its own down the mountain leaving me alone with no transportation. I tried to chase after it but the snow was so deep that I just kept falling down. It was like the scene out of Rocky 4 when Stallone trained for his fight with Dolph Lundgren by running in waist deep snow. The combination of being out of shape and the high altitude left my legs burning and me gasping for air.

I finally reached my board which had traveled about 400 yards down the run settling in the center of a crowded blue (intermediate) run. Exhausted, I strapped my board back on and slowly made my way to the bottom of the hill. The most embarrassing moment was not watching kids half my age zipping past me but rather watching a six year old boy crying in his father's arms because he fell and watching his father point at me and whisper something to him that apparenty made him feel better about himself because he stopped crying. I could picture the conversation:

Little Boy: Wah, I hate skiing, Wah!
Father: Look at that guy, he sucks and he's like 5 times your age.
Little Boy: Do you think he's retarded?
Father: Probably.

Sunday we decided to skip the snowboarding and rent snowmobiles for the day. This was by far the highlight of the trip. We took trails and climbed to about 9,000 ft with little incident. A few folks tipped their snowmobiles and one guy drove his into a bush but other than that it was a blast.

The people on the trip were pretty cool. One person of note (Other than Congressman Kennedy) was former Duke basketball player Reggie Love. He was a guest of one of the paying guests on the trip and a future Barack O'Bama staffer come new year. Apparently he also played football at Duke and was recently cut by the Dallas Cowboys so he decided to take a job in politics. You may remember him better after a quick google search of his name.

If you ever have a chance to go to Park City jump at it. The people are awesome. The town is just like Iowa City. There are a ton of bars and restaurants, people walk everywhere and PBR in a can will only cost you $2 at just about every bar you go to. One quick tip, if the bartender asks you if you are with the wedding party, say"YES".

Peace and Love.

Hot Chicks and Hawkeyes

I posted this yesturday and took it down because of the way it made me feel. I hope this makes you feel as good as it does me. Anybody head'n to Tampa for the game.

Weekend Fun and New Cell Phones.

Does anybody have a friend who is always the drunkest guy at the party? The friend that gets in fights wherever you go and gets thrown out of bars routinely? The guy who gets so drunk he wets the bed or the couch or chair he finally ends up passing out on?

Well, in my group of friends there are two of those guys. One of them is my girlfriend's brother Tim and the other is his cousin Roger. Let me give you a quick rundown of our evening on Friday night and you can decide if these guys are people who I should be hanging out with:

About 7:00pm I went straight to Roger's apartment from work. Rog lives in a neighborhood of DC called Adams Morgan which is essentially an adult playground. There are more bars than people in Adams Morgan and jumbo slice pizza places blaring techno music are on every street corner and open until 5:00 am. It's a great place to live for a guy who may or may not abuse alcohol. So, Rog and I went and got some burgers at a place called Asylum, had 2 beers each and went back to his apartment to start work on the 30 pack of Bud Light we bought on the walk home. We threw in the first season of "Arrested Development" and started drinking. Kristen's brothers Kevin and Tim came over to join the party and then their cousins Ciara, Caitlin and Rog's sister Laura. Before we knew it the 30 pack was empty and we were looking to party. The girls were drinking wine so we polished off the Bud Light between 4 guys. About 7.5 beers a piece but I am sure I had much less than everybody else.

We then walked up the street to Zucchabar where one of my friends was having her birthday party, drank 2 beers with no incidents and then walked to another bar named Angry Inch. We ripped a few shots there and drank probably 2 more beers before we started walking to our "go to" spot TS Muttly's. On the walk over to Muttly's we encountered a group of bike messengers on the street. They had been drinking but were minding there own business lookng like they were gonna call it a night because they were unlocking their bikes and talking on the sidewalk. Roger, totally wasted by this point, pushed his way into the middle the group of bike messengers and started chanting, "NERDS, NERDS, NERDS, NERDS...." They all freaked out and started pushing him around and one lady with pink hair and a lip piercing got in his face talking about how it was her birthday and he was ruining it. Rog replied, "Yeah, on my birthday I like to dye my hair pink and ride around on a bike too." It was at this point that people started grabbing their bike locks and threatening to swing them at us. Caitlin and I diffused the situation and nobody was hurt.

On to Muttly's where we drank some more beers and ripped some more shots and decided to go back to Roger's but somehow got sidetracked and made our way back to the birthday party we were at like 4 hours prior. We walked in, headed straight to the dance floor and started hammering some outrageous dance moves when we noticed Tim (Kristen's brother) being dragged out of the bar by a 6'6" 280 Lb. black dude. Kevin ran to his brother's side and asked why Tim was being ejected from the bar. The bouncer said that he found Tim wandering around the kitchen. He didn't know what Tim was doing in there but it was time for him to go.

We tried to ask Tim what he was doing in the kitchen but he was unable to form sentences or really keep his eyes open. We figured he was just hungry so we walked to the jumbo slice pizza place where Caitlin bought us all pizza.

Back at Roger's house Tim sat in the bathroom for a while contemplating barfing while Roger passed out in bed with his sister, Laura. Kevin took his normal spot on the floor of the kitchen, Tim was finally laid to rest underneath the foldout bed that Caitlin and I slept on. Mind you, this is a 450 square foot apartment.

During the night Roger wet the bed that he and his sister were asleep in but the tradgedy was not giving his sister a golden shower but rather that his cell phone was in his front pocket. Needless to say, the cell phone was ruined.

These guys do this every weekend...