Photo dump

Pictures from our most recent trip to Brianhead, Utah! Go see how much fun we had on the warm sunny day. I'm obviously the one in the red shirt.

Here's us hitting some phat manuals.

These really came out well for disposable cameras. So from now on, we'll all be packing a disposable for quick pictures.

Fueled by fivesome

The band may be getting a new member! Our singer/guitarist has always wanted to just do vocals, and so this may be his opportunity for that. Our bassist will be moving up to guitars (he was a guitar player playing bass anyway), and we're trying out a new bassist now. He's really a damn good bassist. Hopefully he just likes our music enough to want to do metal with us.

So stay tuned for news on our band.

Also, I recently picked up some Dean Markley 13-56 strings. These things are monsters. My 'A' string is the size of the average person's low 'E' string. Also, the 'G' string is wound! Can you say tough? It's great for tuning down 2 steps like we do.

Inaugural parody

If you don't read scrappleface, you should. It's kind of a right wingish onion. It always gets a good chuckle from me.

(2005-01-23) -- A red-faced White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett announced this morning that the inaugural address delivered by President George Bush on Thursday was actually an in-house parody that was inadvertantly placed on the podium.

...

"The irony," said Mr. Bartlett, "is that the president delivered it so sincerely, that it looked like he really meant it. The guys over at the State Department had coffee shooting out of their nostrils. Of course, the good news is that none of our allies took it seriously either."

Snow on Tahoe

I certainly can't complain anymore about the snow and ice we saw while in Ohio. I've never seen the amount of snow that I saw over the weekend on our snowboarding trip to Tahoe. There was about 4 feet that fell in the span of about 24 hours. Some places recorded 5-9 feet over the weekend. After we arrived it never stopped snowing until the break when we took our chance to get out of Tahoe. We saw walls of snow beside the road that towered 15 feet or more. It was unbelievable. Our car was buried completely up to the mirrors.

We stayed at Northstar for the first two nights and on Saturday we had to move to another hotel, because we couldn't afford another night at Northstar. It was an adventure that day getting out. It took us about 2 hours to dig the car out of the snow. We then had to put chains on the car, a car that should never see snow by the way. Since the Tahoe area has plows running 24 hours, we were then able to slowly chain our way to a hotel/casino not too far from Northstar.

The riding, however, was awesome. Despite the low visibility from the constant snowfall and the high winds, the mountains were dying to be ridden. We had hoped to ride at more places than just Northstar, but the weather prevented us from getting to Heavenly. We got a lot of riding in at Northstar though. I think I now have the skill of snowboarding down, as long as I don't take it too fast. I'm even learning to ride with either leg forward, known as switch in snowboarding lingo. It won't be too long before I'm hitting fat manuals, monster jumps, and kicking rails.

For the beer drinkers, there is a microbrew at North Tahoe called Lake Tahoe Brewing Co. that has amazing beer. If anyone makes it to Tahoe, definitely stop by this fine establishment and down many beers.

We took some pictures of the trip, maybe I'll be able to get some of those up here soon.

Equal restrictions

Leave it to Thomas Sowell to give me a new perspective on gay marriage.

Of all the phony arguments for gay marriage, the phoniest is the argument that it is a matter of equal rights. Marriage is not a right extended to individuals by the government. It is a restriction on the rights they already have.

People who are simply living together can make whatever arrangements they want, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual. They can divide up their worldly belongings 50-50 or 90-10 or whatever other way they want. They can make their union temporary or permanent or subject to cancellation at any time.

Marriage is a restriction. If my wife buys an automobile with her own money, under California marriage laws I automatically own half of it, whether or not my name is on the title. Whether that law is good, bad, or indifferent, it is a limitation of our freedom to arrange such things as we ourselves might choose. This is just one of many decisions that marriage laws take out of our hands.

So its not a matter of equal rights, but a matter of equal restriction of their rights! Homosexuals should feel good that they cannot have the restrictions of marriage forced upon them. Instead of fighting for marriage rights, they should fight for changes in all the ridiculous laws that marriage allows loopholes for, and then marriage as a government institution will no longer need to exist.

I remember hearing Bush's response to some question referring to the advantages of marriage in avoiding the death tax was something to the effect of "I want to get rid of the death tax." He didn't address how he would give equal rights to homosexuals. He instead addressed the root of the problem of how the government unrightly takes people's hard earned money away when they die instead of giving out the money as directed by the person's will.

I do not understand people's desire to have the government involved in so many aspects of their lives. The government became involved in marriage in the first place to prevent interracial marriages.

Happy New Year!

...and all that jazz.

My holidays were kind of jacked. Ohio experienced a horrible winter storm and our house was without power for four whole days. It was quite an experience. The only thing to keep ourselves occupied was building and maintaining a fire and drinking.

Hopefully I'll get some more blog action going soon.

We're hitting up a four day snowboarding trip to Tahoe this thursday. I just bought myself a kicking snowboard so that I can fall and wreck in style.