Seattle

Thursday the family went to Seattle. It's not in the same state as us, but close enough we can go up for just the day. We mainly hung out at the Pike Place market. They were selling all kinds of stuff there, from jewelry to candles, fish, vegetables, paintings, you name it. I got this studded leather cuff, which was kind of a whim. Blew all my money on it too, it was $15. (truth is, I had been saving my money until I found someone selling bokuto(wooden swords). No such luck.)
There were people playing instruments, like flute, a Chinese instrument that I don't know but it sounds cool, and a bunch of of old Mexican dudes with guitars. And then there were the Fish Flingers. They were yelling various things that were either incomprehensible or in an unknown language, and throwing 10-pound salmon at each other while running their fish market. Very impressive.

We wandered around for a while, and eventually got piroshky to eat. Then we went to a cafe and got coffee and cookies and stuff,which was nice. We took everything down to a park and ate it. The Park had a nice view of the Olympic mountains across Puget Sound, which are pretty cool-looking, being huge, jagged, and covered in snow.
Late afternoon we went home. It was a nice way to spend a day.

A sleepover and stuff

Yesterday I went to Ander's house for a sleepover. It was cool. He has this awesome old house, a cool yard, and a trampoline. Some other friends came over too and we had a party, mainly spent attacking each other on the trampoline. Then most of them went home and a couple stayed, Molly and Lucy, cool people, at which point we began to do other things, like legos and board games. Plus we played SoulCalibur II until 2 in the morning, lol. Because of this, we didn't get up until ten am. I was woken by Molly poking me with a stick. I tried to go back to sleep, but she began to poke me in the head, and it's kind of hard to sleep with a stick being jabbed into your face.
So we got up, ate, and then rode the bus downtown. The idea was to learn how to use mass transit. We went to some cool places, and I spent $5.25 on a plate of yakisoba I didn't even eat. Eventually we took the MAX home. So that's what happened.

PWN BUSH!

Spent some more time on the roof this morning. Nice weather again.
This afternoon, I went to a rally downtown, basically to end the Iraq war and kick Bush outta office. There were like 10,000 people there, seriously. And every kind of person, too. There were hippies, punks, rappers, veterans, beatboxers, and some nudists OMG (O_o). So yeah. We spent the first hour and a half just standing around, listening to speakers and stuff like that. Met some people I haven't seen in a while, including our old neighbor, who's 17 but doesn't look a day older than 13.

After a while, we finally got started marching. Man, it was packed! We moved at a top speed of about 3 miles an hour, at best. We marched a distance that would have taken 15 minutes to walk at most, but at this pace, it took well over an hour. I peace-duded several video cameras along the way. And it was loud. Cripes, we had to shout to say anything. People were always chanting, stuff like "whaddawewant? PEEEAAACCEE! Whendawewantit? NNNOOOWWW!!!!" After probably 600 rounds of that, I figured the question had really been answered. People were carrying a banner in front of us, and people were taking pictures and stuff, so it must have said something pretty influential, but we, being behind it all the way, had no idea what the frack it said.
When it was all over, I felt like I was gonna drop on the spot, because standing for an hour and a half and then marchin at 3 mph for an hour and a half just isn't the easiest thing to do. We got on the train and went back home. I was glad I went. MORAL OF THIS POST: STOP THE F'ING WAR! AND GET OUR DUMBASS PRESIDENT OUTTA OFFICE!

Frogs? I mean, frogs?

There were frogs in our yard last night. There I am, 1 AM, reading a book with the window open cuz the weather's nice, and what do I hear but frogs! They sounded like they were having a party or something. Of course, frogs would not be unusual if you lived in the country or some suburban housing development, or something, but in Parkrose, the closest wild frog location is probably like a mile away. Wierd.
Today, the weather was nice, so I hung out on our roof and read. The living room roof is easily accessible from my bedroom window, which is just cool. I spend time there on sunny days. Well, the weather was nice. I read a book called "The Black Tatoo", It's about demons and stuff like that. It's creepy, and pretty good.
There was also a pair of bald eagles circling over our house. They were kinda high up, but I still took some pix. Here, check them out.

They're pretty rare around here, at least where we are. Cool.
I also rode my bike to the library, and upon turning onto Prescott Street, I was scoffed at by another teenager (it seems to be happening more often. See entry #2 about the wooden sword incident). He clearly thought my bike looked ridiculous, and proceeded to speed up on his bike, I guess to show he was cooler. Admittedly, my bike is a little weird looking, being assembled by a friend with lots of old parts, with odd paint colors and such, but it works beautifully. And this whackass had no room to talk. He was riding one of those supposedly cool bikes, the miniscule ones a six-year-old could ride comfortably on. Hah.

A weekend spent 150 miles away

We went to the beach this weekend. w00t! Actually, I should say, we stayed at a house near the beach. It was really windy the whole time, so we only went down to the ocean a couple times. But it was still cool. I went with my cousins and grandparents, and we pretty much lived on cookies and Juice Squeeze for two days, heh heh...
There was this old lighthouse that about half of us visited(My grandma, J and my cousin Jake all opted to stay at the house), but it was a little boring, because you couldn't go all the way to the top. The ladder was metal, it wasn't about to fall apart! Maybe an "Ascend at your own risk" sign...but no. Nonono. However, it was pretty funny when this kid came tearing down the lighthouse stairs yelling, "Oh my god, there's a ghost up there! We heard, like, screams or something!!" The proprietor went on to explain he heard an alarm to keep people from stealing stuff. The kid shut up after that.
From there, we went downtown, which was full of little souvenir shops, restaurants, and a fish-processing plant sarming with seagulls. Walking along the docks, my mom heard this sort of barking sound, and we looked down and there were a bunch of sea lions hanging out on this floating wood thingy. I am sheerly amazed by there resemblance to overstuffed sausages with faces. They sat there, barking and sleeping, completely unaware they were rapidly becoming a tourist attraction. After watching them for a while, we bought like a pound of candy and went back to the house.
We watched a total of four movies while we were there: "Flushed Away" (OK), "Ice Age 2" (lame), "Mad Hot Ballroom (not voluntarily), and "Monster House" (pretty cool, but the animation could have been better). And Jake was pretty well inseperable from his DS.
The next day we spent mainly packing, as we were only there for a weekend, but we still managed to get down to the beach for a little while, and I found this cool little tide pool that was filled with sea anemones. The surrounding rocks were covered with snails, enough so that it was pretty much impossible to avoid stepping on some. But we fed the squished snails to the anemones. Mmm...
A nice weekend. Yeah.

Another post, and a hike

I'm a lazy bastard. That's why this is my first post since january. Well. Today, I went on a little hike with my bro J and my friend Anders. There's a cool hill a mile or so from our house where you can see the whole city. But it's 600 feet high, so it's a good hike.
Anyways, us three went out. We stopped by the place known as Crap-E-Mart to buy some cheap candy, realized we had forgotten our water bottles, went back, started off again. I brought a thick wooden rod that could be used as a wooden sword just as well as a walking stick. It might have saved my life(leave you hanging...). We made various jokes and trash-talked each other while walking to the hill. What can you expect, we're teenagers.
So we got there, and walking through the forest, we found this homemade-looking dirt BMX run. From the graffiti on the trees, we deduced it was created by pig nazi biker cannibal snipers. That was our best guess.
We were walking along this little dirt trail when we found an arrow on the ground. It was made out of white powdery stuff, probably flour. J thought it was crack, but if people have crack they generally don't throw it on the ground. Anyways, it was pointing up a little side trail. It wasn't the way to the top, so I said we'd explore it on the way down.
However, as we continued along the trail, we found little piles of the same stuff. They were about the size of...um...a muffin, I suppose, and there was like one every thirty feet or so. Nearing the top of the trail, there was another arrow, pointing to another small side trail. Only wthis one had "BM" written next to it in the flour stuff. Our curiosity got the better of us and we followed it. It wound along the edge of a cliff, and finally we reached the end. There was a big boulder here, with "BC" on it in spraypaint and then covered in the floury stuff. WTF?
The little trail ended up looping back to the big one, and right at the intersection there was a floury cross, or maybe an x, in the middle of the path. We continued along the main path, which came to and end. It looped up to some big church, and from there, we followed the road up. Anders and J had been going on about what a wimp I was, but ironically, they quit, like, 200 feet from the top of the hill. They turned around, and I had to follow them.
Eventually, with me berating them the whole way ("who's the wimp now? Huh?") we made it back to the cross. Then Anders, in one of his random moments of wierdness, walked straight through the foliage and started off into the trees. J and I heard something like "Hey guys! Check this out!" We followed and found him going along what could hardly be called a trail. It hugged the edge of the cliff, but Anders said, "I think this is the quickest way down." I replied with "I'm suing you if I die," and followed him.
We scrambled along, trying not to fall off, when we finally reached a drop of a good 40 feet. It was very rocky, and Anders was already climbing down it. J and I rolled are eyes and tried to follow. In the process, J managed to drop his $5.00 water bottle. It bounced down the rocks, taking along some pebbles, and we were confronted with the classic "looking-down-a-huge-drop-with-rubble-falling-into-the-void" movie camera angle. His bottle rolled into some ivy at the bottom. Anders was already down by this time, watching J's bottle roll.
Eventually we made it down, but I almost slipped once, and my wooden sword walking stick thing probably saved my life, as I thew it out to steady myself. J found his bottle, but we had forgotten about the 60-degree slope after the cliff. We ended up sliding and bouncing all the way down, to be confronted by the first arrow we saw--pointing to the cliff behind us. It was really wierd.
The rest of the time passed without incident, but with a lot of lame immature insults. Teens can be wierd (who doesn't know this?). Speaking of teenagers, we met some of the idiots skateboarding all over the steps at the elementary school. One of them saw my stick thing and said, in this really sorta whiny voice, "hey kid, wanna swordfight? I'll poke you all over!" I rolled my eyes and told him no thanks. Seriously, don't people like that have something better to do? But the sword thing does attract attention.
Anyways, that's what happened today. Coolness.