Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Before I go.....

I’m about to leave for a week in Cannes tomorrow. Given, I’ll probably be quite busy during the week I doubt I’ll be able to blog from Cannes. However, I think I’m going to try and figure out how to use twitter properly and actually do some micro-blogging. If you don’t have a twitter account, don’t sweat it, you can read my updates here or you can just follow the twitter updates on the top right side of this page.

The festival itself should be pretty awesome. There’s some pretty big time speakers including Kofi Annan, Nobel prize winner and former secretary general of the UN; David Plouffe, the campaign manager for Obama; The CEO of Google Eric Schmidt and finally Steve Ballmer, head of Microsoft, or you might just know him from this amazing video. The whole thing is basically like the Oscars of the advertising world so I’m curious to see a lot of that glamour and such that this industry used to be known for. This is one of the few fossils of the old lambourghini owning, 3-martini lunch taking part of the industry that used to exist up until about the 80’s.

Needless to say, I’m pretty psyched to be going, the competition part should be pretty cool too and I’ve gotten invited to a bunch of ridiculous parties, so hopefully I’ll come back with stuff rife for an interesting story or two.

With all that about to happen I thought I’d do a quick post documenting last weekend. Me and Christy went down to Seattle to hang out with my mom for the weekend, who happened to be on holiday and had just come up from San Francisco.

After getting down into Seattle Friday night we cruised to the harbor area to grab some seafood. Admittedly it was a nearby touristy spot, by no means off the beaten path, and none of us were really into the food but it was quick and easy. One weird thing though, the portions were huge. Christy ordered the chicken and got 2 chicken breasts on top of a pile of asparagus. It doesn’t make any sense.

Another observation that probably has something to do with the portion sizes, and I wish it wasn’t the case, but man, there were a lot of fat people. And super fat people. Like when we were walking around there’d be times we’d have to slow down because they were blocking the entire sidewalk. It really pains me to say that too cause I’m often the guy defending the U.S. to snide Canadians, but yeah, lots of fatties.

So after a few more drinks Saturday was a pretty early night. Friday we got up early and started the day at Pike Place Market. Checked out the fish chucking stand, the first starbucks and grabbed the best mac and cheese I’ve ever had at a homemade cheese place. Also walked by this sweet food truck, shaped like a pig. One thing I will say about Americans, they are way better at gimmicks than Canadians. Seriously, the difference between this stand and any other is a dude who got some sheet metal and went to town. Also you always see signs in the states like “Best Pizza in Town”or “The place with singing waiters”, I like it about them, they’re not afraid to go out on a limb, maybe look a little silly if it’s going to be successful.

After doing the touristy stuff we went off the beaten path and headed up to Capitol Hill. Another observation about Seattle, it really feels pretty cool. And is a fun place to party. The place is really into supporting local microbrews and also offers cheap beers. I saw happy hour signs for dollar beers and $6 PBR pitchers. Sweet. It’s a real contrast from Vancouver. Where Seattle seemed full of sweet bars and that feeling of being on the edge, it really didn’t make it’s accessibility to nature as a focal point of the city. Seattle seems like a great Friday night city, where Vancouver is an awesome Saturday afternoon city.

On the way to Capitol Hill, we went up around Pike and Pine near Broadway and stopped at a pretty awesome diner for some food and beers. Along the way we saw some pretty cool public art stuff. It’s always nice to get away from the super touristy stuff to check out the neighborhoods of the city. Seattle didn’t disappoint. Along with all this stuff we stopped in some pretty cool shops, bars and restaurants, even a garage sale.

After a quick stop downtown to shop a bit the girls went to the hotel to take a nap. Knowing there was a soccer game going on that day (The Seattle Sounders have sold out over 30,000 every game this year) I went down to Qwest field to check out the pregame stuff. Unfortunately, it was 3, and the game was at 7:30, a little too pre-game. Still I sat at a sick sports bar, had a beer and saw some pretty hardcore soccer fans from San Jose (the visiting team). After that, grabbed a cheesesteak enjoyed the architecture and met up with Christy and my mom at the top of the hotel for some drinks and truffle oil fries (a little too intense tasting for me).

After that we went back up to Capitol hill for a burger and a lot of beers. The night was a lot of fun though I’m sure we all got more drunk than we expected to. Next mornings extreme hangovers were proof of that.

It was great to see my mom, and hang out in Seattle with her and Christy. Seriously I highly recommend visiting Seattle, the place is pretty awesome, I definitely need to go back and party hardy sometime.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Thursday nightin’ it.

Okay this past week I didn’t have the excuse of being super busy to avoid updating this thing. In fact it was quite the opposite. Weather has been awesome and it’s the first time in a while where I’ve had the opportunity to leave work at 5 and just enjoy the evening.

For the weekends I’ve been spending a bunch of time trying to catch fish. Which is literally beyond annoying at this point. There were fish jumping everywhere but none of them wanted to bite my stupid hook. Next time I’m bringing dynamite.

In totally unrelated good news, me and Christy are meeting my mom in Seattle tomorrow and spending the weekend checking out the city. The one time I went there I spent the entire time either drunk, hungover or watching Canada lose to Brazil in a soccer match while drunk, so it’ll be nice to actually hang out and see what the city is all about.

I’ve also spent a bit of time skateboarding again. A friend who works at a skate magazine out here sent me a link to a few un-burly skateparks at my request. I’m stoked to roll around again. So far I’ve just been doing flat ground tricks so I think it’s time to take it to the next level and grind some stuff.


But perhaps the biggest news of the last few weeks is a little “gentlemens wager” I’ve set up with a few friends of mine. I happen to have two friends out here who compete in pretty serious beach volleyball tournaments, think kings of the beach or super spike V-ball for NES only less baseball hats with the brim flipped up and fewer dudes named sinjin. One of the dudes has won a shit load of cash in these tournaments so yeah, he’s a professional player by definition.

The other player also competes in these tournaments. In fact he spent basically the entire winter in Brazil training with some crazy beach volleyball coach down there. So yeah, not only is he a big time volley ball player, but he basically is pro-recession considering he took his Canadian dollars and spent them in Brazil. I mean I’m not one to throw around the words “freedom hater” but, I’m just saying…..

Anyways, with all that being said we’ve made a deal. Me (and my buddy Scott) Vs. Them. The challenge is I need to score one point in a game up to 25. But I need to cause the point. So I can’t just hope for them to serve it out of bounds. I need to get a point. Personally I’m hoping something awesome happens like I spike it down on them, but seriously it would only be fair considering they’ll probably spike it in my face 20000 times in a row. Did I mention they’re freedom haters? I think one of them was in Guatanamo under suspicion for a little bit.

So yeah. People’s champ vs. the 2 freedom haters. More details, and hopefully some coverage of this event to follow.

Monday, June 1, 2009

blowng my own horn again

A website called stimulant online asked me and Jon Murray (the dude i won the Cannes competition with) 5 things we thought were cool. Here they are. They're the 5 things across the top

Note: they edited our descriptions. Like where they say "Metal isn't our thing", I didn't write that, metal is my things. I love metal.

Oh yeah and went to the river again yesterday and didn't catch a fish despite seeing them jump everywhere. Soooo frustrating.

Also, got big news on a competition i'm going to be a part of with some friends out here. More on that when I'm not so busy with work.