7 Lane Parking Lot

!!!ATTENTION!!!
Movie links are now in red. Movies are generally pretty funny, otherwise I wouldn't waste web-space on them. Click the damn red links you stupid lazy hippy.
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7 Lane Parking Lot is my official term for highways around here.

Before I go any further perhaps I should further explain the greatness that was the day of our going away party.

Our going away party takes place on 2 Friday's ago, beginning at around 2 a.m. which is when my sister (Danielle), Brenna and I were anxiously awaiting the arrival of Danielle's boyfriend, Justin. We weren't sure if he was going to be making it due to flooding in Michigan...but as soon as we were questioning the timeliness of his arrival he was whistling at us through our living-room window.

We all go to sleep around 3 a.m. cut-to 7 a.m.

We all wake up and are freggin' tired. Justin and I go to Penske to get the moving truck and car trailer. Brenna and Danielle aggressively defend an open parking spot in front of our house for when we come back.
Upon return we feast on a Cinnabon breakfast, a.k.a. "The Breakfast of Champions."
Justin and I then proceed to load up the truck, as Danielle vigilantly sits gaurd in a recliner to makie sure homeless alchy's don't steal our t.v.'s. Brenna was off battling trolls for twine.

A couple hours later Amazing Surprise #1 takes place:

I'm in the truck tying boxes down with Justin and when I go to get out Kai is standing there (he lives in NYC) with a huge grin on his face. Holy shit that was awesome. (Especially since Kai's car has been impounded for a while and even if I had the slightest idea he planned on comming I would have figured he had no way of getting here)

After many hugs, smiles, and golfing hats we all continue to load up the truck when a racist fight breaks out. Apparently some black woman was letting her child run down the street and a white guy (who ended up being a neighbor we didn't know we had) called her a "monkey" for not keeping an eye on her children. The rest took place pretty fast, but somehow she was yelling at him and about six 15-year-old black kids were joining in with her (while smoking stoogies) along with a giant middle-aged black man. The white guy proceeded to call them "niggers" so they rebuted by spitting on him. His next response was to grab a MagLite and tell the 10 of them that he'd take them all on. Yeah buddy...smart.
Eventually the crowd starts to thin out, but not without a death threat to the white guy. So the white guy calls up someone on his cellphone and says, "Bring the stuff! Yeah, bring the stuff!"
A few minutes later (after everyone is gone) a red pickup truck pulls into the white dudes driveway, and a guy with a pitbull gets out, and another guy with a katana (samurai sword). Now the white dude takes the sword and puts it in his windpants.
Keep in mind that there is no one left to even fight.
The white dude then proceeds to pace around in his front yard with a pitbull and a katana stuck down his pants.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention he tried to apologize to Kai (who had NOTHING to do with the whole thing, and was just watching from our porch) for calling the other guys niggers.
Needless to say, white dude gets "Asshole of the Year" award.

After packing up most of the truck we all decide to go to Just Pizza to get the best pizza known to man, the 3 Cheese and Steak pizza.

The details to this adventure are vague to me now, but they involved us trying to order pizza from the woman at the counter, and her telling us we had attitude. It made no sense. Brenna was asking for a "white pizza" which was listed on the menu, and the woman at the counter didn't understand what it was, so apparently that made us rude. After she finally got the order straight she couldn't swipe my credit card correctly (it wasn't the card because the damn thing worked fine, and still does) so she asked another customer behind us to make their order ahead of us. While preparing that customers order she talked about how rude we were as if we weren't even there. So when she finished I asked if I could have my card back (before she could figure out how to actually swipe it correctly) and she asked, "Do you want your card or the pizza?" So I asked again for my card. She tossed it to me and told all of us that we needed to learn manners.
This is odd because no one (out of the 5 of us) really said anything at all the whole time. So we went to a different Just Pizza...

We get back to our house with delicious pizza in hand, and Amazing Surprise #2 takes place:

Kevin pops in out of nowhere (he lives in Ohio). Kevin is one of my best buds from growing up, so you can imagine the crazy awesomeness of this surprise. Wups! Don't poop your pants yet! There's more surprises in store!

So we all hang out and just kinda joke and talk and stuff until around 8 p.m. which is when the party is supposed to start getting under way. Well, it took a little while to kick off, but that's ok because we had Amazing Surprise #3 to keep us occupied!

Dudley showed up (from Rochester) with a Garbage Plate from Taho's!

Now don't get me wrong, I was very, VERY happy to see my sister/Justin


Eli


Nick

and Poker-Matt come to the party by this point, but in order to recieve an "Amazing Surprise" ranking two criteria must be met:
1) Travel from outside of Buffalo with the sole intention to attend our party.
2) Comming to the party with no previous indication that they would be in attendance.

At this point certain rules started to take shape. Three memerable ones were 1) If someone pushed the play button on the robotic skeleton of an Easter toy, it would play the Chicken Dance song, and everyone was required to break out into chicken dance

2) If someone even mentioned or hinted at the funnel that Eli brought they had to funnel their drink, no questions about it

3) was if someone could guess the flavor of Dorritos that were taped to a fake ficas tree they got to keep the whole bag, the secret answer was "Booler Ranch."

So a little after Dudley came Penny, and her posse showed up,

everything past that was a blur. Ron and Carrie showed up

followed by Kate and Sean (now proud parents of a batch of Sea Monkeys!)

and Jon and Andrea.

I know that out of nowhere Amazing Surprise #4 the old Caz Crew (mostly from Fredonia now) showed up.

which led to a lot of interesting games of "Who's in the closet with Cazenovia!?!?"

giving everyone from Cazenovia "rasberries" (here's an amazing video of Nick getting one)

and cuddling in pillows.

The crew was followed by a few more peeps, including Jon


Brian and Stephanie


Ben (or, at least the back of his head)


"Beck"


Mauricio and his woman


and The Invisible Man.

and the entourage of "Wilk 5" buddies (from UB) which included Matt


Pat


Marnie


and the last, but definately not least, Amazing Surprise #5 Steve!

Then of course we ALL know who was the last to come, Mr. King of Fashionably Late, who opperates in his own time zone- OP!!!


All of this seemed to lead up to the last event of the evening: Ron giving Kate her Birthday Lap-Dance

which turned into Ron and Kai giving Kate a lapdance (hey, at least Kai wasn't naked)

all of which infuriated Kate, who got angry

kicked over the "Drinking Jenga" tower

and ruined the party.

Actually, I'm just running out of pictures and getting impatient about telling the rest of my story.

Moving forward to the next day.

Kai left early in the morning, as did my sister and Justin. Brenna and I spent the next day packing up what little left there was to pack

and having one last BBQ with Ron, Carrie, and Eli.

The day after that we did some more packing related stuff, I played a days worth of video games, including Alter Beast, with Eli (probably the one thing I'll miss the most about moving to Long Beach, since we've been saving the world together since we were kids...goddamnit, now I'm starting to get sad) and went out to dinner with Kate and Sean, and Jon and Andrea.

The next day Ron came over to wish us fair-well and we were off in a truck loaded up with a ton of shit.

I swear it's actually packed really well. Justin and I packed about 6 large pieces of furniture and 25 boxes of stuff PERFECTLY, it's just that all the little things that got packed last are thrown on top of it all. Seriously though, we packed that shit so tight NOTHING was moved (or broken) when Brenna and I got to Long Beach. Especially the computer, wrapping it in 2 comforters (blankets) and strapping it down with twine to a recliner deemed an effective technique.

So it was the same ol' trip across the country, but this time we had Chester! He was a trooper :)

It's weird, after driving across the damn thing 3 times it really doesn't seem that big anymore. This time it still took us less than 3 days to get across, so...I don't know what people are thinkin', it's not that long of a trip to drive across.

One major change on this drive was the whole "driving a huge-ass truck that's towing a car" thing. Especially when a car drove by us and waved us to pull over in the middle of Oklahoma. So we pulled over just in case, not really sure what the person was getting at. I hopped out of the truck, not really expecting to find anything wrong, walked to the back, yup so far so good, then further back to my car, yup still good, and then around to the back of my car, HOLY SHIT.

Where is the tire?

Yeah, the back driver-side tire was COMPLETELY gone. It was a metal rim standing on the ground. Apparently the tire blew pretty violently, because it took off some of my back bumper with it. I would have taken pictures of it, but because we pulled over onto the shoulder of a 2-lane highway with a lot of semi's and cars going 85+ mph, it didn't seem like a good idea to stand in the road for that "perfect angle."

So we called AAA and they needed the mile marker we were at (since we were in the middle of bum-fuck-nowhere), the closest of which ended up being about a half mile from our truck...or at least that's how long my jog to find one seemed.

Funny story about that too. So I'm jogging along-side trucks doing 85 mph thinking about how we're fucked and there's nowhere around to buy a replacement tire, when it dawns on me that I'm probably going to get bit by a poisonous snake considering it was hot out and I was running through dry, thick grass.

So eventually some dude comes in a tow truck (oh yeah, mile 154, it's hard to forget that number now) and tows my car about 10 miles to a shop in the middle of nowhere.

They pop a used tire on it in about 5 minutes, charge me $30, and send me on my way.

In case you don't know, typically fixing a tire with a leak usually costs more than $30, we got un-describably lucky on this whole thing.

Before we left though, I asked for some duct tape to fix up my bumper...what else would you use to fix something like that? ;)


Here's some pics of another vehicle they need to do some work on...she's what we call a "fixer upper."



So we were back on our way, and wouldn't you know after 1 mile we almost got attacked by a dragon!

Freckin' Oklahoma, it's a death-trap. Thankfully that was the end of anything interesting for this trip though.

Alright, so Wednesday night we stopped in the middle of Arizona to get a hotel room so we could watch Lost. We were definately in the middle of nowhere, sandy dirt all around us, and the only thing that was kinda close to us was a KFC. So naturally we went there to get bicuits, but the retarded 16-year-olds that worked there couldn't figure the order out. So for $1.86 we got 4 biscuits and 4 apple turnovers. Whatever, I'm not gonna argue.

We watched Lost and Chester ran around in the hotel bathroom like a bat out of hell, then we all went to sleep.

The next day we got to Las Vegas and hung out at Brenna's parents new house for the day/night. Her mom came home with KFC...ok. I guess we can eat more biscuits, I try not to eat fast food (although I'd probably make an exception for DQ's tangy lime chicken tender bascuit), but I figure bread doesn't count. Then we spent some time in the hot tub, got 3 hours of sleep, and hit the road again- but this time I'm driving the truck and Brenna is driving her car (remember!? We left it there last trip. Ahhhh, we so clever!).

So we got to our new home, and unpacked for 2.5 days solid. Here's the pictures of where we live, although it will change a little soon, we have about 30 frames of cool pictures we're going to hang in the living room, along with our maps from driving across the country.

One funny antic you might enjoy, but still worries me, when we finished most of our unpacking, and were resting, it dawned on me...shit what if there's an earthquake? So I turned to Brenna and asked her if I should superglue all of our stuff down, or tie it down with twine. She told me not to worry about it. What crazy bitch!?! What about my computer!!!

I swear Earth. If you even TOUCH my computer, I will KILL you.

Without further a-do, here is our new place, in extreme detail since most of you will probably never come out here to see it:

Our apartment is the window on the 2nd floor, above Brenna's head.


If you were looking straight on at our apartment, like the picture above, and turned your head left, you'd see our neighbor's super-sweet house


and if you turned your head right, you'd look down our street.


Now lets head inside. This is what it looks like when you enter the first door to the building, it's a lobby/mail-room type entrance.


If you keep heading straight through the lobby/mail-room this is what you'd see outside that 2nd door, the stairs to our aparment are the first ones on the left, the courtyard is down further (you can kinda see it).


So if you turn your head to the left (towards our stairway) you'd see this


Before we go upstairs, lets keep walking towards the courtyard, this is where 80-million cats hang out. Brenna loves them. I figure there's so many if I stomped on a few no one would even notice. It's a win-win situation.


Past the courtyard is a gate that goes into our back alley, which looks like this


Every house has an alley behind it here. People are required to put their garbage in these alleys, and use the garages for parking if possible (by law). This way the city always looks clean, since the garbage is hidden, and you have a whole auxilary street/alley system in which to evade the cops. That's why we have so many helicopter chases here :) So if we head back into the courtyard, walking back towards our stairway (also heading back towards the entrance/lobby we came through) you'd see this, our stairs are now the last ones on the right.


Note the patio/deck thingy above the entrance/lobby we originally came through, that is our balcony. You get to it through our closet...you'll see.


So lets head up the stairs to our apartment


This is the door at the top of the stairs. Metal gated doors are typical here, I don't think it's actually crime-related because even the very very nice houses have them (same with un-necessary fancy bars on the windows).


When you open that door you are greeted by our "Hallway of Art and Track Lighting."


The first door on the right, which you can't really see in the above picture, is our Spam-Tastic kitchen


If you look in at it from the hallway


And step inside and turn your head to the right


Then turn back around to leave the kitchen, you see the hallway again through that door


So now we're back in the hallway, and looking at what was the first door on the left


This door leads to our bedroom


This is the view from the bed, note the dangerously high, really heavy, t.v. Yeah, that's my awesome earthquake alarm. I figure it'll wake us up if there's an earthquake. And crush our legs.


Back to looking straight into the room


If you turn your head to the right a little more you'll see Chester's cage, and our open closet door.


If you step in the room and look straight at the closet


and walk towards it, this is what is to the left


If we step into the closet, and turn our bodies to the left


and spin all the way around 180%, this is what's behind us


Spin back around


and open the door!


See? that's how the door in our closet gets to a balcony. No it doesn't make any sense, but at least you know what Brenna and I have been talking about now :) Here's the view if you sit in the blue chair


Ok, lets go back in the hallway we started in. Remember how if you were looking down it, the kitchen was the first door on the right, and the bedroom was the first door on the left. The bathroom is the 2nd door on the right (past the kitchen)


So lets go in


and turn your head to the right


Now we're going to go back to the beginning of the hallway, where we came in the door. Immediately to the left is a road sign


and a little ways down past that are the portraits Erik and Emily (er..."Emerik" as we all know them! Oh! speaking of which, Brenna's friend Sha came over the other night and in her cell phone she had us listed as "Brender" holy crap...we're like a west coast Emerik!) made for us


and on the wall to the right is my beloved H.R. Geiger print


Ok, lets get our bearings straight again. We are now looking down the same hallway we walked into when we started. We now know the kitchen and bathroom are on the right, and the bedroom is on the left. If we walk straight to the end of the hallway we come to the door of our living room, notice the crow that my mom gave me freshmen year of college for Halloween, it's always been placed above a major doorway in every apartment I've lived in (I wonder if my mom knows that...).


So if we walk through the doorway into the living room, we see the couch and some bean bag chairs we just got at Target (on sale! woo!)


this is what is outside the window in the picture above, I call it "Take that Buffalo!"


up-close


turn your head to the right and you see


turn your head to the left and you see


Not-so interesting fact: that entertainment center (recently purchased from Walmart) weighed over 300 lbs. and took over 4 hours to assemble (faster than the suggested 5 hours! take that instruction booklet!)

Even-less interesting fact: the coffee table on the floor actually has a dark green center, which is awesome if your favorite color is green.

Extremely interesting fact: the door behind the entertainment center actually opens with a pivot. It can't do it now because there's a entertainment center in front of it, and storage boxes behind it, but here's a clip of me playing with it before we unpacked all that stuff

If we walk into the living room, and turn around to face the doorway we came in through, you see a built-in cabinet to the right of the door (notice the pictures Franco's mom gave me a few years ago, also a staple to every wall in my apartments). Also take note of the closet that's to the left of where the entertainment center was, that's my computer cave!


If you walk towards the computer cave, this is what it looks like. Typically when I prepare to enter the cave, I pull the chair out into the living room, sit in it, grab each side of the doorway with my hands, and LAUNCH myself into it!!!


This is Command Center Omega XIII. (complete with nudie pic of Luba Licious from Leisure Suit Larry)


If you turn your head to the left


or to the right


See the black drape in the above picture? Behind that is boxes full of sentimental stuff, skis, etc. but it was crampin' up the style of my cave, so I made the black drape wall. (also the lamp in the picture above, i should have went with 75 watts, 125 is a lil' too bright...)


Oh? What's that Command Center Omega XIII? You have a weather report update for me? 72 and humid in Buffalo? and 93 and dry in Long Beach? How informative! (yes I have a toolbar that shows me Buffalo vs. Long Beach weather, it updates hourly)


Alright, well that's it for our apartment. Oh! Want to take a walk down to the beach, it'll only take 1 minute if we walk fast, or 30 sec. if we run.

Watch out for the creepy vine tree in that dude's lawn!


Ahhhh. That was a nice walk and/or run. So this is the beach that's right near us. The paved part is a running/biking trail that runs the length of the beach. There's also no BIG waves because there's a jetty out a few hundred yards to break them up for the harbor that's off to the right.


If you turn your head to the left


and to the right is the harbor for cruise ships and other large boats, along with a huge aquarium. I'll get better pics some other day.


And so concludes this posts tour of my new life in Long Beach. There was more to this update, but it's stuff that can wait. This was a pretty long post (sorry about the wait, this took quite a while to make) so go take a break, lay on the couch and stare at the swaying palm trees and listen to the birds chirping, while the gentle, warm, slightyly ocean-scented breeze blows into your apartment...oh wait...you're in NY

SUCKAZ!!!!!!
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met a man
He was a good man
Sailing and shoring
Dancing the beta can-can
Making me foreign
Oh yeah

I want to live in los angeles
Not the one in los angeles
No, not the one in south california
The got one in south patagonia

I want to live in los angeles
Not the one in los angeles
They got a bunch down in moleville
They got a bunch more still

I want to live in los angeles
Not the one is los angeles
They got one in twenty-five two five
Works just like a beehive

I want to live in los angeles
Not the one in los angeles
Counting helicopters on a saturday night
The symphony of the fair light

I hear them saying los angeles
In all the black and white movies
And if you think they star-spangled us
How come we say los angeleez?

I’ll wait in los angeles
I’ll wait in the pouring sun
No way
For not anyone
No way

I met a man
He was a good man
Sailing and shoring
He got a betatron, man
Talking that foreign
Oh yeah

I’ll wait in los angeles
I’ll wait in the pouring sun
No way
For not anyone
No way

"Los Angeles" -Frank Black