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On Waleska’s recommendation Jacob, Kim, Matt from Oregon, Travis and my mom all decided to go to a Brazilian Carnaval. It was at the Mountaineers Club. The main attraction was live music and dancing. There was kind of a dance lesson, but it felt more like an aerobics workout to me. It was fun to get everyone out dancing though. I was especially glad to see my mom moving around after her hip surgery. She did a lot of walking and dancing this weekend. I think most of the people there were Brazilian, because I heard a lot of what I assume to be Portuguese being spoken. We’d dance, then sit and drink a little, then dance some more, taking in the people dancing on stage and a few costumes. Lots of fun.

We were all getting a little tired and things were winding down a little after midnight anyway, so we wanted to find a bar to go to. I’ve been wanting to go to Earls on the Ave since it moved to see what it was like, and boy is it disappointing. It’s totally lost that Earl’s feeling it once had. It’s where the All American used to be and it seems to have the same crowd. Michelle is still mixing drinks, but Travis’s drink wasn’t that impressive. The Earl’s I once knew and enjoyed, and counted on to get me drunk off two long islands, is gone.

Travis came up from Portland for the weekend and was going to see a group called Awesome. What can I say, the name is awesome. Unfortunately, their show wasn’t. Travis and his friend Joe who have liked the band in the past, also were very disappointed in the show. It was a very free form sort of performance, kind of like free jazz, but not improvised and not jazz. It was in a church, which was cool, but it made absolutely no sense to me and wasn’t all that fun to listen to. There were parts that made me very sleepy and caused me to lay down on the bench and shut my eyes, but then there were parts that were loud and dissonant. There were lots of instruments including a banjo, castanets, a flute I think and typewriters. Interesting. There was also a spoken word part in the middle that involved lots of repetition of phrases that made absolutely no sense to me. Not even interesting.

Based on what Travis and Joe said, I won’t write Awesome off forever, but I’m not all that excited to go see them again. Except for the name. It’s awesome.

My old friend Danny has moved to Seattle now that he’s graduated and got a job at Boeing, so I finally saw him to go skiing. Boeing had a special deal where it was only $12 to night ski at Snoqualmie. We thought there was a special deal on rentals too, so we didn’t bring our skis. Turned out to be full price so we rented snowboards to try something new. We had each only snowboarded a few times, so weren’t very good. Danny’s dad Mike skied while we boarded, and none of us had been on the slopes for a long time. The first few minutes we thought were going to be miserable the whole night since we could hardly move without falling. We finally started to catch on though, and by the end of the night we were able to make it all the way down the hill without falling. We even went over a few jumps, once or twice without falling.

I didn’t realize how late Snoqualmie stays open. We started around 4 and they’re open until 10. That’s almost as much skiing time as you’d get with a day pass. The runs are nothing amazing, but with a drive as easy as I90 and the discounted tickets, it was a helluva deal.

I took a day off to go skiing with April at Crystal Mountain. The beginning of the day was amazing for snow. The top of the mountain had been closed the day before for high winds so all the powder was untouched. Unforunately, the high winds continued and they closed the top of the mountain again around noon, so we were forced back to the lower runs. They were icy and the snow was choppy since it had been warm enough to melt a few days before and then froze again. The wind was ferocious too. I didn’t have anything to guard my lower face and had to skip the last few runs with April since my face felt chapped.

This was the first time I had been back up in about three years, and I forgot how much fun it was. I’ll be skiing more this season hopefully.

The Vegetarians of Washington, which Kim and I are members of, sponsor free classes that include yoga, nutrition and cooking. The class we went to today was at Whole Life Yoga in Greenwood.

The yoga section was a really good class. Kim even liked it and she’s kinda picky about what yoga classes she likes. The nutrition section was all about how a vegetarian lifestyle is healthier. It was very informative, but I knew most of the stuff already. There’s a good general overview of the basics of why to go vegetarian on many websites, but this little lecture had a lot of citations of medical studies that were fun to see. The cooking demo didn’t happen because some of food was forgotten, but that was okay because I was ready to go and we got tofutti chocolate as a consolation gift.

Kim and I are planning on going to Veg Fest this year to help out and give Kim a chance to meet some good vegetarian chefs – and to eat a lot of really good food of course.

Kim and I went with her friend Jessie to a pizza party with a bunch of people who work with Jessie at the Student Conservation Association. Sarah and Chris hosted the gathering and it was a ton of fun. It’s really nice to hang out with young, educated, passionate and environmentally minded people. It makes me more optimistic about the future of our world, although it also makes me sad to realize that it’s really a very small microcosm of our society.

We ate really good food including pizza that we helped make. There was no meat in site and I think almost everything was organic. I really liked the green olives stuffed with whole cloves of garlic. Between those and the pizza toppings, I ate a lot of garlic.

Once a bunch of people left it was down to just the hosts and Kim, Jessie and me. We were told to bring games and now it was a manageable enough number to play settlers of catan. Yes, again. That game is too much fun.

Gabe and I went over to Armin’s to watch the NFC championship game of the Seahawks against the Carolina Panthers. I’ve come to expect Seattle teams to disappoint me in the playoffs after amazing regular seasons as the Sonics and Mariners have done so often lately. However, this game was Seattle dominated the whole time. There were 8 or 9 people yelling and screaming with every Seahawk touchdown or interception, so there was a lot of yelling. Armin’s mom cooked food for halftime too, so it really couldn’t have been much better a game.

After the game Gabe and I went running and we probably heard 25 people yelling “go seahawks” or honking their horns wildly. Seattle will erupt if we win the Superbowl, at least as much as a city in the middle of what feels like the longest gloomy spell ever can erupt out of their seasonal affective disorder, zombie-like state.

This game is too much fun. I’ve played Risk with friends before and thought it was fun, but mostly because it was an excuse to hang out with friends, drink and shout, but that’s about the extent of board games that I’ve played in a long time. Settlers of Catan is just plain addicting. I think it’s a lot like Civilization IV on a board, made for multiplayer.

It involves building settlements, collecting resources, and trading. In Risk when an opponent screws you over with attacks and lucky dice rolls all you can do is call them names. In this game you don’t attack opponents, but there’s all sorts of more satisfying and subtle ways to compete, and dice rolls can benefit multiple people at a time. What really makes board games fun is the social aspect, and this game has all sorts of ways to interact: trading, blocking routes with roads, blocking resource production, stealing resources, and competing for longest road or largest army.

Normally I’m not a big fan or randomness in games because it leaves little room for skill, but in this game the randomness makes it more interesting by forcing you plan a strategy based around what is most likely to happen. It’s not just hoping that the dice roll the highest number, because sometimes you want a low number, or a low probability number to pay off since high probability numbers pay for just about everyone.

Now the only problem is finding people to play when I want to which is all the time lately. I just found out that there’s an online version (although it’s run by MSN and only works with Internet Explorer), but I don’t think it will be nearly as fun without friends nearby to share it with.

Kim and I needed to wear the dog out so we decided to go snowshoeing. Your options are severly limited when hiking with a dog. We found a trail in a book that would work, but it was only at 800 ft so would almost certainly have no snow. We stopped by the ranger station near Quilcene and got a recommendation for hiking Mt Zion. We decided to hike a nearby trail but couldn’t get past a pickup that got stuck and blocked the road. We had some good snow though so we started hiking up. Still not enough snow for snowshoes. It was fun to get out in the snow, but it was too foggy for views. The dog Gretchan seems to love the snow.

On the way back from the hike we stopped in a bar to catch the end of the Seahawks game. Playoff victory!

I have a confession: I’m addicted to this frickin Lost show.  I got one disc from Netflix to see what all the fuss was about, and next thing you know I’ve bought the first season and am downloading the second off Itunes.  In a way it’s a great show with all it’s mystery and character building, and in a way it hate it for always leaving me with more questions and wanting more.  I haven’t had a show that I really looked forward to watching every week since I was in junior high.  I wish I had gotten into it a little later so that a few more seasons were already out on DVD and I didn’t have to wait.