Guitar Hero and Los Olivos

You got me. I did say I’d post “tomorrow,” but tomorrow is so relative these days. OK, so maybe it’s not, but I have to come up with some excuse. It’s been 7 days since my last post. I haven’t posted for good reason. First off, I was in Arizona and with all the Guitar Hero I simply didn’t have enough time. I was too busy living the moment to write about it. Joshua tried to make me write, but in all reality he’s a panzy. He gave up after like 2 minutes. “Jeremy you should really post….ooh Guitar Hero.” :) After I got home I was pushed right back into work and it’s been fairly crazy. Now it’s Thanksgiving, so I actually have a few minutes to sit down and write something. I should have gotten a lot more done yesterday, but I ended up sleeping half the day because I had a terrible headache. Today I spent some time working, and I had quiz practice. I’m swamped I tell you.

So anyways, now I’m going to write a little about last weekend and fill you all in. Last weekend was a blast. I flew into Arizona on Friday night and met up Josh (who lives there) and Peter (who flew in from Minnesota). Josh and Pete are really good friends from college. I’m sure everyone is familiar with Josh by now as he uses my blog to make fun of people (mostly me) on an almost daily basis. Peter was my roommate my senior year of school, Josh, Pete and I were all in the Computer Science program at Bethel, and I was in both of their weddings. Needless to say we’re fairly close, but we don’t get to see each other very often. Josh moved to Arizona about a year and a half ago, as his wife is almost a full fledged doctor and she’s doing her Residency down there. Peter continued to live in Minnesota after school (since he’s from there). I came home to Chicago, after a brief on again off again living situation in Minnesota.

So now that you’ve got the history, here’s how the weekend went. Friday night we grilled out at Josh and Allison’s house, hung out, got caught up on stuff, got the tour, and mostly just hung out. I think we played a little Guitar Hero too. We pretty much played all weekend, so if there’s missing time in my story assume we were playing Guitar Hero. That game pretty much rocks. I’ve toyed with the idea of actually buying a Nintendo Wii just so I can play it with all of my free time. We also talked geek talk, which would bore most people to tears. However, all three of us would date our computers if we didn’t have wives (errrr I guess maybe I am dating my computer) so it was quite the fun talk about algorithms, programming languages, and .NET versus everything. We ended up staying up way too late as witnessed by my last post.

Saturday we woke up at about 10, had some breakfast and then headed to Sedona. Sedona is about 2 hours north of Phoenix, and I can honestly say it’s gorgeous. I’m going to say it’s one of, if not the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. God pulled out all the stops when it came to designing the landscape. Everything there is very red from the red rock that makes up most of the landscape. The plateaus and mountains were just stunning. I have lots of pictures of the Sedona trip (and not much else actually) so check them out in my gallery. In Sedona we hit up some lunch at an awesome barbecue place and then rented some mountain bikes and headed to the hills. Mountain biking was a ton of fun, but not without a few adventures of it’s own. I’m amazed at how some of these mountain bikers do it. I probably walked half the trip along the trail because if I had ridden it I would have fallen in a precipice. We were actually stopped at one point and watched a mountain biker (who was obviously a pro) scale up a 45 degree incline (which included very uneven ground) on his bike with no problem at all. Pete tried it of course, but in the end all of us proceeded to walk up the same path.

A little later I lost my footing and fell. Luckily I wasn’t on my bike, and luckily the fall was only about a foot difference (OK 7 feet if you count my height). I tried to catch the bike which had slipped, but gravity is a harsh mistress and she brought me down quickly. Luckily I was able to stop my fall with my funny bone on my right elbow. This in turn caused me to lose feeling and movement capabilities in half of my right hand for about 20 minutes. That was a bit scary. It was sore for a couple of days, but since then I’ve been fine.

After recovering for a bit we continued on, only to find out a few minutes later that Josh’s bike had a flat. We spent probably 20 minutes trying to figure out how to take the tire off unsuccessfully, only to realize that if we did get it off we’d be unable to remove the wheel from the frame since the back wheel didn’t have a quick release. That put a damper on things, since you kind of need a wheel to go on. We called the mountain biking place, who told us that if we re-inflated the tire it might stay inflated. I guess there’s some cool goo inside the tire which hardens around any holes in the tire. Luckily my bike had a pump (neither of the other two did), so we tried that, but to no avail. In the end we ended up heading back. Josh ran back most of the way with his broken bike, while Pete and I stopped to take pictures. We made it back safely, and the guy at the shop even gave us Josh’s rental for free because of the trouble. After we had turned in our bikes we took the long way home so we could see more of the scenery. All I have to say is “simply gorgeous.” We didn’t go into flagstaff, but the area right around it is really pretty.

part of Sedona…taken right after mountain biking…beautiful no?

After we got home we headed straight to one of Josh’s favorite Mexican restaurants where we had dinner. It was really good Mexican food. Better than here, by far. I guess it has to be with it being so close to the border. After dinner we headed home, played some more Guitar Hero, and then played a rousing game of Risk. Pete destroyed us, but then again he’s the world dominating type, so it fits. I got knocked out first, and since it was 3 in the morning, I opted to take a quick nap on the floor. That was a mistake. :) After some more Guitar Hero we headed to bed.

Sunday we slept in since we had stayed up so late, got up and had some awesome egg bake Alison had made. It was yummy. Then we watched some football for awhile, hung out, and talked some more code. At about 1PM my friend Suzy showed up to pick me up. She recently moved to Arizona, so I hadn’t seen her since Eric’s wedding. We hung out at Los Olivos (another great Mexican restaurant!) and she shared some exciting new things in her life with me. Then we walked around downtown Scottsdale as she gave me the tour of her childhood. Then we headed to her place where I got the tour there. Her place is really nice. It’s pretty big in comparison to condos here in Chicago. After that we headed to The Sugar Bowl (where I did not order a bowl of sugar against my better judgement) and we had ice cream. I ordered the Banana Split and Suzy got a sunday. I actually finished the whole thing too. :) Once we were done at the Sugar Bowl, Josh and Pete picked us up, we headed back to her place to say goodbye and then Josh, Pete, and I headed back to his place.

After getting to his place we had pizza from Papa John’s (which as of right now I realized I never chipped in for. If you want some mulla for the pizza Josh you know where to find me.). We finished the entire pizza, including almost 4 slices by yours truly (I didn’t finish the crust on one piece). After that we had another rousing time playing Guitar Hero and then we watched Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (probably one of the funnier Will Ferrel movies to come out as of late). After that we decided to play a little poker for about an hour, which we had to quit when Josh went to bed (something about getting up early to work…pffft :)). Pete and I of course jumped at the chance to play some more Guitar Hero. :) Sadly we went to bed soon after.

Monday morning we woke a little earlier than Sunday, mostly because my phone annoyed the heck out of Peterman with it’s incessant beeping letting me know I had a text message. The text message was from my friend Melissa (another friend I was hoping to get to see while in Arizona). Melissa came and picked me up for lunch and we headed to the Macaroni Grill. It was great to reconnect with her as well since I hadn’t seen her since Eric’s wedding either. She used to live in Chicago, but moved down to Phoenix about a year and a half ago. Lunch was great. We got to reconnect, talk about old times, eat some food. After lunch we headed back to Josh’s place where the boys were playing guess what…Guitar Hero. We had talked about going hiking up a mountain, since I had missed out on a hike with Pete and Josh the day before when I was hanging out with Suzy, but I opted not to do it, since I was tired, and we had only about 3 hours before we had to leave for the airport. So instead we finished our poker game (which was mighty fun I might add). Then it was off to the Airport, with a quick stop at the In and Out Burger for dinner and so Pete could buy his lovely wife a t-shirt. Josh dropped us off about an hour and a half before our flight, we said our goodbyes and that was it. Vacation over.

I was actually really bummed on the flight home. I really miss those two guys. I get to talk to them online or on the phone from time to time (and Joshua is a regular here of course), but it’s not the same. To be able to hang out with guys you love, that you can be real with is awesome. We talked about making this a regular occurrence (a once a year guys trip), so I’m hoping it comes sooner next year rather than later. Maybe next year we can make it longer, though Peter is having baby number two in February so that may be difficult. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Wow, this is pretty long. It actually took me two full days to write this off and on, what with Thanksgiving, and the various things I needed to do over the past two days. Was it worth the wait?

The gallery of my pictures can be found here. The pictures Joshua took can be found on his flickr page here.

It Was an Engaging Party

Eric asked the love of his life for her hand in Marriage earlier today. I guess it was an all day engagement date. You have to give the guy huge props for planning such an event. They spent pretty much the whole day together, and then had an engagement party at his tonight house to celebrate. There must have been 40 people there. It was pretty cool for me because I knew quite a few people there. We had people from Bethel, the Journey (Friday Bible Study), our Sunday small group (which now that I think about it maybe had the name Islands of Shalom…I’ll have to ask them on Sunday.), as well as people from Eric’s and Karen’s families. The people I didn’t know were the trinity crowd, as well as most of Karen’s family.

Anyways, the party was a lot of fun. We surprised Karen, who didn’t know about the party, mingled some, ate food, and generally just hung out. Eric also provided a slide show with all the pictures from the day. All in all it was a pretty cool experience.

I’m very excited for them, since this is a new big step in their lives. The wedding is coming up pretty quick (May 4th - Are you serious? :)), so they’ve got quite a bit of planning to do, though I heard rumor they had already done some of it. They’re both awesome people, and I think they’ll do big things for God as a couple. I can’t wait to see what that looks like, and I look forward to seeing that play out.

Here are some pictures from the party. The rest can be found on my gallery here.

Surprise!

Where’s the best place to watch a slidewhow? Front row of course!