So there I am Friday morning waiting for the bus to take me to work when I see this bus going the other direction rather silently... It had the "OUT OF SERVICE" marque on the front but as it pulled up tot he intersection with some maintenance guy behind the wheel I did not hear any engine noise.

Well, not far behind the bus was this Mammoth tow truck. You know, the kind that move other trucks.

At first I'm thinking, "What the hell is this tow truck driver doing...?!" because he pulls RIGHT up behind this bus; like scary close. And then he proceeds to inch even closer!

Finally it dawned on me, this bus was broken down and the truck was pushing it along.

Sheeeeit. That takes some balls for sure. You know the truck driver can't see a damn thing and when they started out from the intersection it was NOT a slow start. No way, this guy punched it and the bus fairly shot across the intersection and off they went.

Yikes.

Seattle is awash with bicycles in general and in the circles I travel it's that times 10. Even so, sometimes I see a bike that really amazes me; like this Schwinn Varsity here.

If you look closely you will see:

• BMX pegs for crying out loud! Not like the rider ever uses them but still...
• The ubiquitous (for Seattle bicycle messengers anyway) top tube pad.
• The single speed drivetrain.
• Unlike most hard core messengers, this person rolls withOUT toe clips but has a front brake to compensate.
• Steel (or are they tin?) fenders.
• A full-on Brooks saddle! I see this so often, no matter how cheap and cobbled together the bike, the owner opts to totally pimp it out by breaking the bank on one particular component. In this case it's the saddle. I mean you could buy at least three of these bikes for what that saddle cost; including pegs for each one.
• Of course this ride is sporting the chopped and flipped (upside down) road handlebars. Nothing less would do for the messenger look.
• Note the chainstay protector, and it's protecting this frame from what exactly? Besides, it's a single speed bike,the chain will never get anywhere near that stay.

Anyway, it's pretty cool when people like their bikes enough to dude 'em up like this. Seriously. It won't stop me from making fun of these machines but style has no objective basis obviously.

“Honey, are you going to wear your cologne today…?”

Oh my god, you’re damn straight I will, I love it when she says that. What could be better than knowing the girl of your dreams thinks you smell great? Not much, that was rhetorical.

I gotta say though, the name of this cracks me up. Ralph Lauren Polo Double Black. Like “Black” (which they have as well) just wasn’t enough. The bottle is wicked cool, no denying. Plus, I wore this at our wedding. Killer bottle and sentimental value, can't beat that.

Anyone who has had a childhood knows what Mad Libs are. And anyone who has a kid between the ages of 8-15 knows who Strong Bad is. Today Cameron showed Shelley and I some Strong Libs. I was howling!

Plus it sure beats the heck out of watching the Trogdor video for the eight thousandth time...

to change up their logo. Like today – Veteran’s Day.

I love that. Sometimes it’s the little things.

I wanted to add some additional Blogrolls on the home page of our blog and I wanted to be able to name them whatever I wanted. After poking around I found that you can edit this file here:

dasblogce\themes\your_theme\homeTemplate.blogtemplate

All I had to do was this.

• log in to our blog
• under Blogroll, create a new OPML file (called "martin" in my case)
• add an entry to this new file
• in the homeTemplate.blogtemplate file in our theme I added this code:

• save the file

Now, when I refresh my blog home page I can see my Blogroll on the side. In my case I also commented out the original Blogroll entry to hide that.

Nice...

This is occurring way too frequently for my tastes these days. Here is what usually happens.

• I fall asleep.
• Something wakes me up.
• I can't fall back asleep. Until it's time to get up or the alarm goes off that is, then of course I can go from awake to deep sleep in record time. Do not pass REM, do not collect $200.

Tonight the 'thing' was some loud noise like a gun shot at around 1:30 am. By the time I hauled my groggy self up to look out of the window all I could see was some clown running down the sidewalk and disappearing from view. And by clown I mean, "some jerk that has nothing better to do than cruise neighborhoods other than his own f'ing around and making loud noises and why can't he get a job that requires him to wake up a the same time as me". And by too frequently I mean it's happening about twice/month.

Normally our neighborhood is nice and quiet but I sometimes forget that it's on the border of the CD (Central District).

ASIDE - the CD has a reputation (justifiably I guess) for being a somewhat rowdier neighborhood than others; like say Medina or Hunts Point or Magnolia.

In fact, I recall some time after I moved into this house that signs started appearing indicating that this was now the Central Neighborhood. I guess "Neighborhood" sounds much more classy than "District" or maybe it was just to try and avoid the stigma of the CD and boost property values.

Anyway, here I am. It's 3 am, I have a glass of lemonade and I'm on the Internet. :(

That's right, you read it here first (if you read it on the Internet at all)! Today I married the woman I have been crazy about for the last three plus years.

Not to worry, I did not spend our wedding day on line writing this post... through the black box miracle that is blogging technology I am able to create a post and back-date it so what you are reading here was actually written after our wedding.

Hey, at the very least I had to wait and make sure this day was actually going to happen.

Pictures to follow once our photographer gets them to us.

Adendum

Here are the pictures.

On Saturday, 13 October I finally got an appointment with Jimmy the Saint.

This guy had been recommended to me long ago by Kempton B but it seems every time I tried to hook up he was busy or I was not free when he had an opening. So nothing happened for quite a long time.

Shelley and I were walking home from downtown that day and I decided to drop in just to Seattle Tattoo Emporium just to check and see. “How about tonight at 6:30?” Yes!

Finally. I had been wanting this for ages and have been monkeying with the picture trying to simplify it enough so that it would not bleed or blur too soon as the original was crazy detailed.

After walking Shelley home I had to leave rather quickly and hit the cash machine. It seems all tattoo parlors only accept cash. For good reason I suppose, eh? Imagine all the contested charges on credit cards on account of customer dissatisfaction.

The whole ordeal took about 3.5 hours. Almost one was Jimmy tracing the design and prepping me (he used a straight edge razor on my arm!) and about 2.5 were actual tattooing. So without further ado, here are the pictures I took with my phone.

This guy is really good. Instead of relying on the lines to give me exactly what I wanted he basically used them as rough guides. He’d kinda glance at the original art and then just draw it on my arm. I loved watching him get all the detail perfectly right when my arm was awash in ink – totally amazing.

Recommendations are worth it!

Nice! Today Shelley ran twice around Green Lake (with a little detour thrown in) for her first running race since I have met her.

http://results.active.com/pages/oneResult.jsp?pID=25604014&rsID=48231&pubID=3

Okay, 10 km is 6.2 miles and so her pace is about 9:53? Her goal was to go under 10 minutes per mile so this is fantastic.