It’s “summer schedule” so that means we do things with Kelly & Patrick on the weekends like go to the wave pool in Blaine. Me in shorts. Ha! That you gotta see...or not. I actually like the wave pool though. It gets crowded as hell but i just work my inner tube out to the furthest point and i’m away from all the fat suburban slobs and it’s really quite peaceful. This was the convinience store we stopped at on the way. I think we bought some Cheeze-it’s and bottled water. I love the “Euro” cigarettes and the fact that they are the cheap brand. Very euro. It’s as if it was there to just remind me that “Robb, you are no where NEAR europe right now...hahahahaha!!!” Cruel.

We’ve had fun at this thing before so there was no reason to believe we wouldn’t have fun again. Wrong!!! Usually this is my first taste of fried food on a stick that works as a good warm up to the state fair. Wrong! Maybe i was too tired. Maybe i wasn’t hungry enough. Maybe i wasn’t brain dead enough to deal with all the white trash. Maybe all of the above. Probably all of the above. I knew the minute we walked through the front gates that i just wasn’t up for it. I tried. Believe me i tried. I had quite possibly the worst foot long hot dog i have ever had in my life. Like you can actually fuck up a foot long hot dog...how? Try “cooking” it in pure grease for what must have been hours...of just long enough to turn it into a shriveled crispy prune of a hot dog. They should be thrown in jail for serving such a piece of crap dog. But that still looked like a better option than what the flag lady here was grilling up...cigarette and all. And how about the guy in the back ground? Yikes!

Instead of going out Pam and i decided to hit the back yard for a bottle of wine. One bottle led to two bottle...two bottles lead to three bottles...the ipod was out and we were playing “name that tune” and before we knew it it was 4:30 in the morning. Naturally we called Kelly & Patrick to wake them up for summer schedule as we were going to bed. It’s the least we could do for all the saturday morning 8:00 a.m. calls we’ve received from them.

Tuesday nights for quite some time i’ve had band practice. Don’t know what it is but something about tuesdays has worked for the last 3 bands i’ve played in. Strange. This is the sweet liquor store that’s by our practice space so when it’s my turn to supply the refreshments i like to stop here.

What’s with people and the way they drive cars? Maybe i just notice it more because i ride a motorcycle and am hyper aware of the fact that the idiot talking on a cellphone and not paying attention can kill me. But people really do drive like idiots. Maybe it’s because cars are so advanced that they almost drive themselves. I can testify to the fact that you really can drive a car half asleep and still get to where you’re going. Cars to day are like moving Lazy-Boy chairs, the require almost nothing from the driver to make them go. So when i looked out our front window one day and say this teenage kid standing next to his bashed up pick-up truck explaining his story to a cop i wasn’t surprised. As far as i could tell he gunned it pretty hard to try and make the light, not seeing the car he was about to pull into. All drivers of cars, please listen: Relax. Chill out. Calm the fuck down. You will get to where you’re going sooner or later. Quit trying to shave 3 seconds off your arrival time. Unless you have a liver in the backseat that needs to get to the hospital now, slow the fuck down!

THis place caught my eye because it’s a barber shop with a chick’s name on the door. Strange. Can’t say i’ve ever seen that before.

Sometimes an ice cold beer at a wine bar is the way to go. Cold is really the main deal with the weather like it’s been. It has to be some sort of record or something. We’ve had more days in a row of 90+ tempurtures than i remember in a long time. I think we only had one day last year that got above 90 degrees, so we’re paying the price this year. Fall is gonna feel real good when it gets here.

Buster gets sick. Life sucks. What a suckass way to spend a weekend; in examining rooms at the UofM animal hospital with doctors that can’t seem to figure out what’s wrong with the damn dog. And just when we think he’s getting better he gets worse and we’re right back in that exam room. Yuck. It was a hard few weeks that followed this drawing, that much i’ll say.

We didn’t eat much while Buster was sick, but we had to eat something. So when we felt good enough I treated us right and got Quang to go. Quang is the best Vietnamese food in town, known for their big ass bowls of noodle soups. The stuff is great. And judging by the 80% asian to 20% white breakdown of the customers the place is pretty authentic. I went their busy time; anytime in the afternoon. I stood elbow to elbow with people waiting for a table or waiting for their to go order like myself. The people watching was great. The ease dropping is not so great because i don’t speak Vietnamese. I was digging this little girl checking out me and the stacks of dessert items they have wrapped up to go on the counter in front of her. She seemed pretty sure of the desserts, but not so sure of me.

Just to compare the “real deal” to the new “hip and trendy” deal, we went to Rice Paper for food the next day. Rice Paper is a nice place. It’s hip looking. In a hip neighborhood. It’s spendy. It’s clean. Quang can’t say any of those things. But while Rice Paper is good and safe and all that (i could take my parents here), it just isn’t as good as the real deal. And no surprise here: 100% white. 0% asian.

“What the hell are those things?” At least if i was that guy that’s what i’d be saying. We had these costumes made up for a client of ours, 3M. We’re doing some work for laptop privacy screens they make so these wandering eyes walk around and stare at peoples laptops and hand out samples. “Keep wandering eyes off your laptop”. Get it? Whatever. It was a good excuse to hang out on Nicolet Mall and look at people for a couple hours.

How do you smile for a photo in one of those costumes? We even hired a photographer to document the day. I felt sorry for the poor suckers in those eyes...it was over 90 degrees out that day and the sun was just beating down. The novelty of that would have worn off real fast for me and i would have called it quits after about 5 minutes. The things we do for money, huh?

This dude was gettin’ his groove on big time. Not too many people pay much attention to street performers though. It’s too bad really. This guy kicked out more soul in 5 minutes than most office workers do in a week.