Warning: The following post contains possibly crude and certainly infantile language. Proceed at your own risk.My friends Sean and Ashley live in Montana - big sky country - and like good Montanans they ski, hunt, fish, drink beer and play hockey. They recently started up a team in a local league and (not surprisingly) named themselves the Rocky Mountain Oysters. If you're not familiar with Rocky Mountain Oysters, learn more (and find a recipe). They're also known as Prairie Oysters, Mountain Tendergroins, Cowboy Caviar, Swingin' Beef and Calf Fries. So, yeah, they're bulls' nuts and people eat 'em. Montana hosts an annual Testicle Festival where you can get 'em served up just about any way you can think of. The festival's catchy tag line is "Have a Ball!"
So, how do I fit in to this nutty scenario? Well, every hockey team needs a killer* logo for their jerseys, so Sean called up his most favoritest graphic designer to help design some jersey art for the Rocky Mountain Oysters. *Totally unrelated side note: Apparently, surfer-speak use of the the word "killer" to market healthy bread is fraying the fabric of our society and putting our children at serious risk. No, really. From the April PCC newsletter's letters to the editor in regards to Dave's Killer Bread:“Great bread, we love it. BUT we, and many others, are contemplating approaching PCC to discontinue your line because the use of ‘killer’ and ‘bomb’ are not amusing and should be rejected as marketing ploys. We are pondering a boycott because we don’t want to normalize these ideas for our children or promote this kind of thinking in our culture or at our table."Hmmm. There certainly seems to be a lot of pondering and contemplating going on. Maybe, as Jello Biafra would say, they and their children were forced to meditate in school. For some perspective, read about Dave's Killer Bread, his marketing ploys and his bread jihad and I'll let you draw your own conclusions. (Thanks to Beth for the newsletter tip!)Anyway, keep your eye on the ball, nutty professor. So Sean emails his request and ideas and I jump right in and grab the bull by the...eh... I created some preliminary sketches for the team, including a very scrotal "M" which I was certain would be rejected by Ashley, but I included anyway to give Sean and myself a middle-school snicker. You can take a look at the sketches below (as always, click it for a larger image):
As expected, the design with the scrotal "M" was immediately cut (ouch!). They did like aspects of some other designs and I worked with them back and forth a bit to finally develop the finished product:
So, there you have it. Look out Montana, there's a new team in town and they're gonna put your balls on ice. And...testicle jokes ending in 1...2...3.Though today is indeed April 1st, this is for real. Speaking of April 1, today marks six months since I quit the cigs. It's also now been about six weeks since I quit the gum. I'm nicotine-free, baby! Booyah!
Beth's mom came up to visit last weekend and stayed with us for three nights. We spent Saturday and Sunday indulging in pure Seattle tourism. A brief recount:We swam through the crowds at Pike Place Market where folks (including us) line up for fresh-fried mini doughnuts and a view of flying fish. Pike Place is also the home of a wonderful busking duo who play Pink Floyd favorites on acoustic guitar and accordion with much passion. Awesome. We sat in a mess of weekend + downtown + midday + sunny day + construction traffic, where we moved three blocks in an hour. Less awesome.We tried to ride the Duck - an amphibious craft seen all around the city during the summer, full of tourists and an obnoxious driver/tour guide in fuzzy floppy hat. The tourists all have bill-shaped horns around their necks and are instructed to "quack quack quack" at the locals, much to the uptight locals' collective chagrin. The Duck was booked. I'll admit I kind of wanted to ride it once, just to know what it's like from the other side of the plastic quacker.We went to the Bodies exhibit downtown to see Chinese political prisoners playing soccer and tennis without their clothes or skin. Some aspects of the show were fascinating - especially the displays of the vein systems - like this one of the lungs - colored bright red or blue and suspended without any other tissue - just a delicate, intricate web of brightly-colored threads. Overall, the show had more of a circus sideshow feeling than a medical exhibit. It might not have helped that the "docents" were young kids with shaggy beards and piercings and high leather boots - and white lab coats. Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against piercings (had one), beards (see previous post) and leather. But they don't really project medical knowledge at first sight. We rode the monorail from Seattle Center to downtown and back. A neat ride on a groovy vessel through towering buildings, but it lasts only two minutes. The monorail achieved international fame with its supporting role in the locally-made film Safe Passage.We took the great glass elevator up up up 540 feet to the tippity-top of the Space Needle. Though it was a bit overpriced and heavily-touristed, this excursion was amazing. You can walk outside to feel the rush of the wind and look down down down to the ground below (always the savvy marketers, you can see the golden arches painted on the roof of a nearby McDonald's) and you can stay inside where they provide tables with Seattle's best view (except that it's missing the Space Needle) and plenty of screens with interactive displays and cameras where you can control the angle and zoom. And you can buy coffee. We lingered up there for quite a while. After living in Seattle more than a year and slowly becoming familiar with different neighborhoods, it was incredibly interesting to stand up there above the city and look at it all patched together in 360 degrees. It was vast and beautiful and intricate and felt like home. 
From the observation deck - you can almost see our house from here. No, really! It's across the lake near that tall white building by the base of the long bridge.
Looking east to Capitol Hill, Bellevue and the Cascades
It's windy out there! There's one upper lip that's not feeling the cold.
In a recent post I raved about the arrival of spring and sipping margaritas on sunny decks at happy hour. Well, I love love love how the northwest giveth and the northwest taketh away. I didn't see it, but apparently there was a dusting of snow earlier this week, here in the city. I felt it - cold, rainy, gray. I admit I typically prefer the cold and gray but I was really beginning to dig those warm sunny afternoons. Lucky for me, this slight emotional upset (tissue, please) was rectified when I learned that some students at my university of employment were promoting a fundraising event called Mustache March. I know, right? Nothing brightens a cloudy day like a big thick mustache. I carved this beauty a few nights ago - just before a dinner party where I met a lovely pair of retired doctors who seemed amused at the idea. It's funny that since our New Years mustache shenanigans, those furry lip caterpillars just don't seem so out of place to me anymore (I know, this is how it begins).
In addition to a great excuse to wear a mustache, March also has the honor of being my birthday month. Actually, not only is March my birthday month, but also the birthday month of my sister Kiasa and my friends Zack and Andrea. AND - get this - not only is March our shared birthday month, but March 9th is the actual birth DAY for me, my sister and Andrea, with Zack owning March 3rd.What I'm getting at is that the universe obviously smiled upon 3/9/10 and our three simultaneous birthdays by showing me this sign:
Yes, that's a panda face in my blender. My typical morning smoothie was graced by a birthday miracle. Step aside, Jesus on toast. Right after this photo was taken, I blended that panda into oblivion and then drank it into my belly. With flax seeds. (The astute among you will notice the lovely "Wine Country" print oilcloth we use for a counter surface while we wait for the concrete counter top to be constructed)Always incredibly thoughtful, Beth made my birthday a memorable delight. In the morning before work she let me open my gift - a large box which had been occupying an off-limits space on the porch for three weeks. It was an ice cream maker - joy! Old-fashioned style with the wooden bucket and you can actually choose between a hand-crank option or 'lectricity. I loved our old ice cream maker and used it often in Davis. When the old motor burned out, I never really made it past denial to reach the other four steps of grief...until now. Want to know what summer tastes like? Give me some cream, sugar, berries, ice and rock salt. So attentive she is to my whims and whimsy that she also purchased for me an odd set of wooden letterpress blocks. I'm looking into a letterpress class and am generally fascinated my all things printed and...and she wrapped it so nicely with some textured paper - ooh, texture. The green parts felt all fuzzy on your fingers. The blocks were - curiously - all the number 1. Different sizes, different typefaces, but every one of them...one. We considered mounting them in some way, perhaps drilling holes into them to hang or to stake up but with the magic of Google I learned that such blocks are becoming rarer and that folks who actually use them to print have sincerely asked the world to collect them and display them as they like, but please don't alter them - so that they might at some point eventually reenter a printer's drawer. Turns out they look pretty nice just stood up on our mantle anyway:
That is all. Snowboarding tomorrow? Welcome, weekend!
Quick post to show off some photos of my newest shirt design. In addition to these I've also got a green on black and a black on black. The jury's still out on the black on black. We'll see how it looks after it's dried and been set with the iron.
