Caption This!

See what happens when you feed the bear?

Marc's Bachelor Party Weekend

As with all things involving a bunch of city folk going out of town for a weekend full of good ole' southern hillbilly fun...and Cracker Barrel, what happened in Tennessee stays in Tennessee. All I'll say is that an excruciating painful bad knee (much thanks for Naproxen), a torn contact lens, and a World of Warcraft podcast that just wouldn't end couldn't ruin the good times I had...

"Dude, a cockroach!"

Jack Daniels Distillery

Must...get...high...

Pork

Beale Street

Interstate

In With the New

After being frustratingly, errr, frustrated, I have finally upgraded my what was once called a (two finger quotes) laptop (two finger quotes) - then called a (two finger quotes) notebook (two finger quotes) - now called a (two finger quotes) (one finger quote) desktop replacement (one finger quote) (two finger quotes). After checking out the specs, you'll find out that the 2007 whatchamacallit is so rightly named since it definitely could replace a lot of PC's that are now sooooo XP.

Da Specs:
-Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.00GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 667 MHz FSB)
-Memory: 2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz
-Storage: 250GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
-Display: 17-inch HD-quality widescreen
-Video card: 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS
-Sound card: Sound Blaster Audigy HD
-Media drive: 8x CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) with dual-layer DVD+R write capability
-Network card: Integrated Wireless-N

It's also Vista compliant (scores 4.5 out of 5.9 on the Vista rankings), but more importantly WoW-mobile ready. Anyone got a subscription card?

Caption This!

Meet the newest member of my "You Got Humped" Club - Joey (Cathy's brother):

(Click on the picture to see how excited Joey is to join the club)

On a sidenote about blog features, the labels feature of Blogger is going to be pretty useful. Hopefully there'll be some regular features like Caption This! and Gay or Not Gay?

E-Session Pictures

Check out a preview of our engagement pictures here! April is an awesome photographer who has a great eye for capturing the moment and a sixth sense for creativity. Highly recommended and wonderful to work with! Great work, April!

Alternate Beginnings

It’s 5 PM on a Friday and I’m on the train leaving work. It’s been a long time since I’ve left right at 5. And there’s lots of time before the 8:30 PM flight out to Washington. Yabba-dabba-...poo??? Awww, crap. The iced venti non-fat extra-caramel caramel macchiato that my friends at work got me is hitting a lot earlier than I had expected and it’s hitting hard. It must be from all that milk in the venti. Or maybe it’s the two extra espresso shots I’m not used to getting since I usually order grande’s. Either way I gotta go and I gotta go right now. I see Cathy in the parking lot with our bags and I can tell she’s confused when I tell her she needs to go back to the car. She can drive as crazy as me when she needs to so I’m squeezing those cheeks and holding it in for dear life. We get back home and I feel so much better. Back to the airport. Not good. I go again as soon as we get there. While I’m sitting in the stall, I look at my watch and realize that we’re starting to cut it close. I’ve never missed a flight before, and I didn’t want the reason for the first time to be because I had a case of the squirts. We check in baggage and get through security with just enough time for me to make one more pit stop before getting to the gate. I sit on the toilet and this time I feel relieved. Oh shit, where’s the toilet paper??? There’s a new unused roll that’s up in the dispenser and I can’t reach up there to get it started. And my plane is boarding! Ahhhhhh!

That is how my weekend started.

It's 11 PM on a Friday night and I'm stuck waiting in line at a car rental place after a long and cramped typical flight from Chicago to Seattle. The clueless customer at the counter makes it pretty obvious to the entire world that he's not from around there, yet he declines the handy navigation feature. Better watch out, Washington, a tourist is on the road so the streets are no longer safe. Not to worry though because after miraculously getting a rental, he comes back a few minutes later and asks if there are other cars available…smaller cars…a car he can actually drive. That’s right, he wanted to return the car he got because he didn’t know how to drive it…and it was an automatic! I’ve got to admit, there are lots of things I don’t know how to do (float, tread water, drive by a funeral home without shouting something inappropriate), but I would rather spill the beans and admit to getting a freaking pedicure before losing all manhood and telling everyone and my mother that I wasn’t able to figure out how to drive a car. I’m still waiting in line.

So that is how my weekend started.

It’s 3:30 AM on a Saturday and I’m in a rental minivan on the way to Anacortes. Between today and the day before I’ve slept a total of a whopping, get this, four hours. Kinda funny in a sleep-deprived sort of way that he who has the least amount of sleep is the one driving the six other people in the car who happen to be sleeping because our nice family-sized minivan has a DVD player in it and someone decided it would be a good idea to play Happy Feet. I really tried to give it a chance, but I had to stop playing the movie after hearing the lyrics, “Don't push me 'cuz I'm close to the edge, I'm trying not to lose my head.” Too late, I lost my head a long time ago.

And that is how my weekend started.

There are tons of movies that have alternate endings, but why aren’t there any with alternate beginnings?

Watching the sunrise at a picnic table in Anacortes at dawn:






Actual wedding location, 110 days from now:

WrestleMania 23 Weekend

Finally...I have come back to Detroit! The last time this pie-eatin, jabroni-beatin son of a gun was in the pimp capital of the world was almost four years ago for a concert which filled Ford Field almost to capacity. Now, I return to Ford Field for the biggest global phenomenon in all of sports entertainment – WrestleMania 23 – along with a record shattering 80,103 people in attendance. Here’s a breakdown of this weekend’s highlights:

Friday
I used to think that traveling was fun, but after spending almost two weeks out of every year for the last few years practically living in airports, going out of town has become downright stressful. Getting to Detroit was no different, having to get through a trains, plane and automobile relay race against time to check-in before registration closed at the hotel. After dropping my stuff off at my room, I decided to search Detroit for a late night dinner and ended up in their Greektown area. Saganaki looks cool, but eating a huge slab of flaming cheese all alone on a Friday night in Detroit of all cities can be very lonely.




Saturday
C.M. Punk’s in my autograph session! There were so many questions I wanted to ask:

How are the Cubbies going to do?
Where did you go to high school?
Since you’re straight-edge, can I get hardcore with Maria?

Too bad the chick in front of me became a woman (i.e. Total Bitch) and started berating Chicago’s Very Own over something that happened in the past to the point Torrie Wilson had to tag herself in to make the save. By the time the smoke cleared and I got to C.M., all I could say was “Uhhh, so can I have a straight-edge pose?”



Next up was a picture with Mrrrrrrrrrrrr...Ken-ne-daaaay (3 second pause)...Ken-ne-daaaaaaaaaay. One moment I’m walking towards him wishing Mr. Money in the Bank well in his match. The next moment from out of nowhere, I’m being body searched by Triple B (Big, Bald and Black) Security because he thinks I’m carrying a weapon. What’s up with that? Hey, at least it gave Kennedy a laugh.

Getting autographs made me hungry so it was time to get on the People Mover and search Detroit for food again. Detroit’s known for its Coney Island hot dogs (hot dog topped with chili, mustard and onions), so I walked from Ford Field over to Lafayette Coney for a couple. Coney dogs are good, but I’ll take a Chicago dog from Jimmy’s on Grand and Pulaski or Gene & Jude’s on Grand and River Road any day.

In the day and a half that I’ve been walking around, I’ve seen or met a bunch of people from the U.K., some Aussie chicks, an Irishmen dressed as Ric Flair, a bunch of Japanese tourists that I thought were related to Funaki and quite a few Canadians. All these people came from around the globe, yet I haven’t seen or met a single person from Detroit. What a shithole.

Sunday
There’s no better way to start off your day than having a nice big breakfast watching highlights of past WrestleManias. Mick Foley made an appearance at the Bacon, Bagels and Biceps Brunch which was pretty cool and even cooler was that he was presenting awards to special Make-a-Wish kids. In keeping with last year’s awkward moment, I was able to make my presence known among a bunch of these kids:

Foley: So what match are you looking forward to?
Make-a-Wish kid: Undertaker vs. Batista
Foley: And who do you want to win?
Wish kid: Batista!
Me: If Batista wins, we riot!
Rest of the crowd: Batista sucks! Batista sucks!

I don’t think Foley was happy with me turning the crowd against the Wish kid because he gave me the evil eye and had us pretend to root for the Ultimate Warrior of the new millennium to make the kid happy.

After the brunch it was onto Ford Field. WrestleMania was more than 6 hours away, but being one of the first people at the gate was a pretty big deal to me. The brief moment that exists when you’re all alone in an empty stadium with nothing but the ring, the stage and thousands of empty seats in between is an experience that very few ever get. Over 80,000 people from all 50 states and 23 countries from around the world, and I’m #1 at the gates…now that’s cool...at least to me.





If you’re a true wrestling fan, there is no event bigger than WrestleMania, and being part of it was just as special as last year in Chicago and also my first time in Seattle. Getting to my seat and watching people sitting at ringside scream in sheer joy and excitement over their great seats brought me back to last year when I did the exact same thing with my WrestleMania brothers and practically lost my voice before the show. And looking at the sea of humanity that filled a football stadium reminded me of how I did the same thing at Safeco Field, amazed at how a single wrestling event could fill a baseball stadium. This year’s WrestleMania theme – All Grown Up – pretty much summed up why this WrestleMania was going to be special to me. Being in the city and the place that started it all, I’ve truly come full circle.

Now for some WrestleMania observations:

- Note to self: There is no better seat at WrestleMania than ringside. Even hobbits can be as tall as the Great Khali when they stand on chairs.

- After downloading and watching WM23, Jeff Hardy’s leg drop off the ladder looked way cooler live than on TV.

- It is impossible to have one synchronized chant going when there are 80,103 people in attendance.

- There were almost four times as many people at WM23 than WM22, yet WM22 was four times louder than WM23. There is no crowd that gets as hot as a Chicago crowd. Even Good Ole J.R. thinks Chicago pwns the world.

- Football stadium + dead crowd + outdoor event = WrestleMania 24 will be a disaster.

It's That Time of the Year Again...

Shamrock Shuffle 2007

Thoughts on my first official race to come soon...

The Big Grabowski

Everything is Bigger in Texas

The hometown team is in the Super Bowl, so other than being in the actual game, where's the next best place to be? Obviously it's Chicago Dallas. Some highlights and observations from Super Bowl weekend:

- If you don't know, the Super Bowl hangout, now in it's fifth year, is the longest running tradition among friends. Some unintended mini-traditions have come out of the big one, and just like Matt Hardy, they just won't die:

Super Bowl drinking game - with Texas playing host to our festivities, this year's shot of choice for every touchdown scored was tequila. Little did we know that the saying, "Everything is bigger in Texas" also meant super huge shots...and the drinking game ended as abruptly as Da Bears scores.

Someone falling - Karma strikes once again as Carl body-checks and tackles Eric against a wall in our hotel room and both fall interlocked in a pretty uncomfortable position. Also unlike last year, I'm not the one leaving the trip with a broken camera.

I get sick - For the second straight year, I've come into our annual get together pretty sick. I don't have a reason why I was sick last year, but this year I can definitely attribute my dizziness to Eric's driving and my nausea to Eric's bad gas. Both of them really stink.


Other highlights:
- I think I had more fun at the hotel going up and down the glass elevator in the hotel than sight seeing in Dallas. For some reason, all that walking in Dallas gave me the shits.



- Speaking of the shits, there's nothing more sacred than the personal time spent taking a nice healthy poop...unless you're with Jackass-lite



- Dallas-Fort Worth Airport is neither in Dallas nor in Fort Worth. Talk amongst yourselves.

- Can you guess the single one, the married one and the soon-to-be-married one?


- Centuries from now, kids in Dallas will learn about me at school. After searching the city for coffee only to find that the best coffee Dallas has to offer is at some a bar, I left my mark on Dallas history by peeing out the beer I drank on a downtown building in the middle of daylight. Seriously, who goes to a bar to drink coffee?

- I knew it was a long shot, but in visiting the site where JFK was killed, I also scavenged the street for any long lost forgotten pieces of his brain. My goal was to start up a new website where people could post their own theories using the free brain fragement they receive (with purchase of said website subscription, of course) as evidence to prove their theory. Was he really shot from the grassy knoll? Use your brain to prove it!

It''s a Girl!

Meet Domino, the new addition to our family!

2006: Year in Review

As much as I’m glad to celebrate the New Year, I hate to see that 2006 has come to an end. Exactly 365 days ago, I was laying next to my then-girlfriend-now-fiancé in her home state of Washington watching how drunk Seattle news reporters ring in the New Year atop the Giant Prick (a.k.a. Space Needle). I was jobless, depressed and down on my luck, and even though I was to fly back to Chicago in a few days, I really wondered if coming back was truly the right thing to do.

It didn’t take very long to see whether or not the craptacularity was going to carry over into 2006. A week after coming back, I received word that Ed had gone missing. After searching his place for clues and discovering that the WrestleMania 22 shirt that I gave him and a Chuck Palahniuk book that I loaned him were missing, I felt comforted in a sick and perverse sort of way at the thought that those items could be his last worldly possessions before he was raped, killed and raped again Katie Vick style before being dismembered and eaten by a pack of hungry werewolves horny for some shit-brickin’ mud-butt flesh. On the other hand, my worries of his disappearance were deepened further by the discovery of his hockey stick. Oh Ed… you should have known that the hockey stick would not only have made a great weapon in self-defense against werewolves, but would have also given you better stability in preventing another dislocated knee or twisted ankle running away from said werewolves in the middle of some the meanest and scariest Wisconsin woods. In retrospect, Ed never was in any real danger, and the best thing that came out of that night was a free dinner courtesy of his uncle.

In February, I flew out to Tennessee to hang out with Carl and Eric for our annual Super Bowl outing which is now the longest running tradition among friends. The trip started out well – sight-seeing in Nashville and a tour of the Jack Daniels distillery – but took a turn after I literally hit rock bottom and fell into a river. Camera!

No matter how shitty the year was going so far, the one thing that kept my spirits up was WrestleMania at the end of March. Next to the Olympics and World Cup, WrestleMania is probably the next biggest global phenomenon out there, and I was glad to be a part of it sitting ringside along with three of my closest wrasslin buddies and the people from around the world that we met there.

March also marked my return to the workforce. After working at several big name organizations since coming out of school a few years ago, I could honestly say that I’ve finally found my niche in the workplace.

One of the things that I’ve always wanted to do was spend a week driving cross-country from one end of the United States to the other. In July, I came close to doing that, driving across two-thirds of the country from Washington State back to Chicago. After doing the drive through the most boring parts of the U.S., I don’t think I want to drive cross-country anymore.

A month later, Cathy and I made it to our vacation spot, the San Juan Islands. A beautiful sunset along the Pacific Ocean, I couldn’t ask for a better time and place to propose than right at that moment.

And the rest is pretty much history. 2006 started out rough, but things smoothed out eventually. It was a memorable year and hopefully there will be more good times to come in 2007. Happy New Year!

Public Service Announcement: Google Reader

I’m not usually one for giving tech tips or web advice, but in the wake of this week’s tragic story, sharing something that I use everyday with others is the least that I could do for someone who, through the articles he wrote, has educated many including myself in the way of new tech gadgetry.

For those of you who aren’t using a news aggregator, why not? News aggregators can save you quite a bit of time since the content on all of your favorite websites can be found in this nifty one-stop-shop web tool. And since aggregators are updated dynamically, you’re always in the know with the most up-to-the-minute information. Most content is in headline format and includes the first couple sentences of an article – this gives you the ability to quickly skim and read only the articles you are most interested in.

Do me a favor and get Google Reader (it’s in their Google Labs section). If you’re new to RSS technology or unsure about what to do with those XML buttons that you see on websites, Google Reader makes it really easy to subscribe to groups of websites at a time by clicking on a single button. Need a news feed? Click on the News bundle and you get feeds to six different websites. Google Reader is blog-friendly as well. If the blogs you like to read are on popular host sites like Blogger, Flickr, or Myspace, all you need to do is enter their user name, and just like that, you’ve created a feed to that user’s blog.

Another great feature of Google Reader is the ability to “star” certain pieces of content so that you can share it with others. Bloggers like me have used this feature as a side item to their blogs giving readers the ability to check out websites that bloggers look at on a regular basis.

So go ahead and get Google Reader. And while you’re doing that, make the Google Personalized Homepage your home page. You can move gadgets around to truly make it the page you want it to be and include only the things that are most important to you.

Our First Christmas Tree

And it's a real one too! I never knew that picking up fallen needles and watering the tree constantly could be so much fun. If only the fake ones could smell this good...

Hit and Misses

Well, it appears that my run at being in a television commercial has finally come to an end. After getting through the first round of auditions, the USA Network Powers That Be decided to go “an alternative route,” whatever that means. Oh well, at least it wasn’t all for naught. I never envisioned myself auditioning for anything, so to do this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. I wonder what the casting agency did with my audition tape, because seeing me impersonate Triple H’s water spit or John Cena’s five knuckle shuffle is more than enough to win on America’s Funniest Home Videos any day. Damn.

I have never shopped on Black Friday before, and after waiting in line all night in 30 degree weather just to get kicked out of line only minutes before the store was to open, I have come to the realization why I’ve never done it before: BECAUSE IT SUCKS! What sucks even more? The $k0ki3 police department...I’ll show you “civil disobedience” – never have I wanted that warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you piss on the car of the cop who royally pissed you off than right at that moment.

While I was having a joyous time exchanging heated Thanksgiving tidings with the cop, my fiancé was earning her ring by freezing her ass off waiting in another line – at Gamestop...for the Nintendo Wii! And here’s a lesson for you soccer moms – waiting in line for one of the most coveted items this holiday season requires you to do one simple thing – wait in line. You get props for being there overnight and thereby pretty much guaranteeing your kid a system, but we take those props back since you didn’t go that one additional step and actually leave the warmth and comfort of your car to join the vigil of people willing to lose a frostbitten finger or three. Stupid soccer mom. They should all just stay at home and make me some babies.

Three Months, But Who's Counting?

It’s been awhile, and a lot’s gone on. Like watching your favorite porno, let’s fast forward to the good parts, shall we?

Have I mentioned that the fiancé and I are now living together? Honey, I love you dearly, but next time you leave me home alone to run some errands, can you PLEASE do me a favor? There’s nothing more uncomfortable than having a gigantic Mexican man stop by to install our cable and internet with scented candles burning and light jazz playing throughout our place. If this wasn’t awkward enough, the thought hit me as he was staring at one of the walls thinking of where he wanted to poke a hole with his drill...at least I hope that’s what he was thinking.

I usually stand my ground and comeback with something for anyone who talks shmack my way, but when a guy on a bicycle dressed in hee-haw overalls and a straw hat at 6:30 in the morning in a non-rural neighborhood is raging at you because you’re in his way, what else can you do but stand there dumbfounded in shock and awe. Did I see that? Someone please tell me I just didn’t see that.

After your woman has been drinking non-stop the whole night and spilling a little bit of wine on your suit jacket here and there, never, never, never make a comment about having to take said suit jacket to the dry cleaners. Because if you do, she’ll claim that the room is spinning and begin to regurgitate and spew all over said suit jacket along with matching suit pants, suit shirt and suit shoes, and thus re-inforcing the need to go to the dry cleaners. Somehow I feel that after a few years, I’ll have enough stories to write a book on the uncomfortable and unfortunate injustices men have had to go through because of women.

To the person that said that fear is the greatest motivator, I think I may have found something even greater – embarking on a late night trip back to Chicago from Milwaukee, and underestimating the time it takes for the White Castle burgers you had at the beginning of the trip to slide through your system. The thought of taking a shit in your own car is pretty terrifying, but the need to get to the friendly confines of your toilet at home is all the motivation anyone really needs to overcome that fear. As if you needed another reason to jet out of Wisconsin anyways.

Even I have my limits. Downing part of a bottle of hot sauce was easy. Downing a beer in a glass of chicken wing bones took a little effort. But downing a cup of bleu cheese? Since someone out there has photographical proof that I spit and definitely don’t swallow, my chances of running for a government office are pretty nil. If it's any consolation, while Drew is trying to sell a few insurance policies to the girls at Hooters, I'm offering them something more useful - a hotel room. I love the hospitality industry!

Last but definitely not least, have you ever laughed so hard you started to cry? Going to dinner with my buddies Carl and Eric is an experience like no other. Especially when we’re going to a decent restaurant and Eric’s stuck having to wear a t-shirt that says “I did it all for the Wookiee”. And if that wasn’t enough:

Eric: Do you have chips and salsa?

Waitress: Yes.

Eric: What does that entail?

Waitress: Ummm, chips and salsa?

Carl and Erwin: OoooooooH

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words

After having our flight cancelled and re-booked to the following morning at the last second...

After being stuck in traffic (Seattle traffic nonetheless) for almost three hours...

After just missing the ferry and having to wait another two hours for the next one...

After getting onto the island just in time for one of our regular places that we normally frequent when we visit to tell us that they're closed...

This makes the entire frustration of sixteen hours of travel by plane, ferry and automobile so much more worth it:


A trip to the winery for a congratulatory bottle of wine and two glasses: $30

Ferry ride to the San Juan Islands: $65

Round trip flight from Chicago to Seattle: $400

A marriage proposal overlooking the Pacific Ocean at sunset: PRICELESS

She said yes!

The Beginning of the End

With the money I just spent, I could have bought:

- A really nice TV and home theatre system
- A PSA 10 Gem Mint 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie card
- The platinum travel package for next year's WrestleMania in Detroit for myself and the people who went with me to WrestleMania this year

Instead, I bought this:



The things you do for love...how much head is this worth?

A Bad Omen?

From the "It Can Only Happen to Erwin" files:

Question: What are the chances of being about to leave a bank and running into an old friend who you haven't seen since his wedding day three years ago and him telling you that getting married is the worst thing you can possibly do?

Answer: Pretty high if you're me and you just went to the bank to send your very first bank wire to pay for an expensive piece of jewelry...like an engagement ring.

That's right, folks, you've read right - I sent my first bank wire!