Hi guys.
ZOMG.
So, today was probably the best day of my life. As such, there are lots of videos and pictures of it. I am posting all of them here. This is going to be a long post. I kind of thought today was going to suck — I was going to be snowed in all day with nothing to do and no one to hang out with. And I was soooo sad because I wanted to be OUTSIDE doing SNOW STUFF but I had no one to do snow stuff with!
Somewhere around 11:30 am, I decided to take Leo outside for a walk. I normally just take him up to the deck, but I thought at least it would be a nice change of pace to take him downstairs and maybe walk around the block. I was surprised to find a couple of my neighbors with their son, sledding down the Aloha exit of the 99 freeway:
I hung out with them for awhile, got a chance to go sledding myself — we were using the lid of a recycling bin as a sled — and, slowly but surely, more of my neighbors came out to hang out. Danielle brought her snowboard:
Later, we decided to go tandem down the hill on the sled. This is the view of the hill from the top:
And this is my helmet cam as we pummeled down:
We posed for some more cute pictures by our apartment:
We got bored of our little hill, and someone suggested we all head to Gasworks park for some more hard-core snow sports. We all piled into Chris’s pick-up truck — a bunch of us in the bed of it, which was AWESOME. Here’s some footage of that ride:
We stopped at a liquor store to buy chips and, well, liquor — not that everyone wasn’t completely wasted by that point — and one of our neighbors was trying to piece together what had happened to him the night before. This story seemed really, really, really funny at the time:
We thought that he was drunk and pissing on the deck and this big butch chick who lives here had punched him out for it. That was a funny story. It turns out the actual story might be slightly more sinister, as the cops stopped by later that night, but I’m going to go ahead and hope that it’s as funny as it seems to be.
We got to Gasworks, which was a zoo. People were there with their skis and their snowboards and their sleds — some people just brought laundry baskets or big cardboard boxes to sled with. It was insane. Here are some pics:
This really nice chick we met let Danielle and I borrow her sled — a real sled, and a fast sled. Someone had built a jump about halfway down the hill. Danielle and I decided to aim for it. This was the result:
Everyone agreed that it was by far the best jump of the day. Which was awesome, but Danielle and I basically ruined our backs for life. She was having trouble walking later in the day (you’ll see that in later videos) and I’m still extremely sore. I also lost a shoe. Yes, that’s right, somehow in the process of that jump my shoe went flying off. This video stops right after the jump, and so it misses the two minutes afterward where Danielle and I laid flat on the ground attempting to breathe, wondering if our backs were broken and slowly trying to move various parts of our body as everyone on top of the hill cheered and laughed. Seriously, it was terrifying and I never, ever want to do it again, and I would not recommend trying it to anybody. But I’m glad I did it once, and I’m glad it’s on video.
We spent a couple of hours at Gasworks, had a snowball fight, then piled back into the pick-up. We thought maybe we’d get to go home, but of course Chris drove us to a bar:
We spent enough time at the bar for everyone to do a shot, then headed outside and had a snowball fight:
We FINALLY got back to the apartments, where everyone went home to shower and change and then reconvene and walk to Buca di Beppo, which is just down the street from us. They sat us at the Pope Table, probably because they felt we’d be minimally annoying to the other customers there. Wanna know why it’s called the Pope Table? This is why:
Do you see the Pope?? Here’s more pics from dinner:
About halfway through dinner, Danielle realized she couldn’t find her iPhone. We knew she’d had it in the elevator ride down from our apartment, so she had to have lost it on the walk to Buca. We went outside and looked around for a little while, but we couldn’t find it. Then Sanna was like, “Oh, we have a metal detector at home.” It is sad that she said that, because then Danielle wanted to get the metal detector. So we went home to get the metal detector, and Chris and I went back outside with Danielle, because we weren’t about to let her wander around alone in the snow with a metal detector. Here’s some footage from our metal detecting. I still can’t really believe this shit happened:
Honestly like half an hour later, Danielle was still looking. For reasons I can’t even remember at this point, Leo was with us, and he was freezing, so he was tucked into Chris’s jacket. Here’s footage of Danielle being sad because she can’t find her iPhone in three feet of snow with a metal detector. “Everything fucking beeps!” was all she could say for the rest of the night:
And here’s Chris comforting Danielle with Leo in his jacket:
Oh, and then there was a homeless man rummaging through the trash outside of Buca:
Chris and I got our pictures taken with him. The whole time he was like, “Are you going to kill me?” and I was like “No,” and he was like, “Okay, because I’m crazy and so people tell me a lot that they’re going to kill me,” and I was like, “You’re safe with us, bud.”
We finally got Danielle to give up the ghost and go inside, and I am safe in my warm apartment reflecting on my FUCKING AMAZING day. My neighbor Mieka was saying earlier in the day that the most fun days are the days that you don’t expect to be fun at all, and then they end up being spontaneously amazing. That’s how today was. It was just spontaneously amazing. Nothing I could have planned could have been this fun. What a fabulous way to spend a snow storm!
