No Metronome...

Did i ever mention that i can keep rhythm with no metronome? So...on the way to the cottage to pick up a toolbox, i stopped by the motorcycle store. Walked around a bit and then finally asked if my grips were in. They were! Lame that they didn't call me, they said they would tell me when the grips arrived.

After dinner i went into the garage to attempt to put them on. i had feeling it was going to take longer than i expected.The first step was to crack open the control box on the right side. Seemed easy enough, just required a phillips screw driver to remove two screws.

Once the control box was opened, i removed the cables from the throttle sleeve and slid it out. Once that was done, i slid the new grip with new throttle sleeve attached onto the handle bar and hooked it up to the cables. All that was left was to screw the control box together.Looks pretty sexy, much better than the lame grip i bought in Canada. Canada is so lame, they can't even give me a decent grip for my bike...
Now it was time for the left handlebar. It was a little bit trickier. i had to unscrew the end cap, wedge a screw driver underneath the grip to release it from the glue...then twist it off. The next step was to get some sand paper to get rid of any remaining glue. Of course i didn't have any sand paper so i took a short trip to Sears. Came back, sanded...cut a spacer to size...applied glue...slid grip on....and done!While waiting for the glue to dry i went back over to the throttle grip and decided to put on the throttle boss. That was pretty easy, just an allen wrench was needed to take the end cap off and tighten everything together. Now i'm good to go for longer rides.Now i have some chrome on my handlebars. They also match my highway pegs! Now if could only find a nut to replace the one i lost on the exhaust...oh well, i guess that could wait.

Vieux Chateau Du Roi Trip to the Carboy

Six days have passed since the vieux chateau du roi started its fermenting and it was time for it to be siphoned into the carboy. i cleaned the wine thief and hydrometer and took a reading. The reading was around 0.994, so the yeast is doing its job. i actually should have done this yesterday but i was too lazy to do it, big surprise.
i don't like to let the siphon rest at the bottom of the primary filter so i grabbed a giant vice to hold the siphon a little above the bottom of the buck so minimize the amount of sediment being sucked into the carboy.
Once again i didn't have anyone to help me with the wine. i did however ask babo to give me hand, but he took a more supervisory roll...kind of like brent in the first step but he had his eyes open...

I Got Me Some Balls

Since manthan is a vegetarian, we went to the near by Super Fresh to pick him up some veggie burgers. Everything my mom cooks has meat in it, especially on memorial day. Anyway, two seconds after walking into Super Fresh these ping pong balls grab my attention. i'm not much a spontaneous shopper but i felt like i just had to have these pong balls.

So i grabbed them and headed over the the frozen foods section. manthan ended up going with the sun dried tomato and basil patties. i've had them before, they're pretty good. If only they tasted like meat...

Anyway, these are no ordinary pong balls. They're clearly specifically made for beer pong. With their crazy sayings, "i <3 beer", "pong", "pong champ". i'll be pretty much unstoppable with these balls at my disposal. If beer pong was a one player game i'd play it everyday, with water...since i'm trying to watch the carb intake and i can't afford to use that much beer.

Hookah Magic

Well it was the night before memorial day and brent, alaine, manthan, and i headed to mariano's. Of course mariano's was closed and so was reed's. So we threw our own shin dig at the house. Kind of hard to entertain three other people on the fly but i busted out drinks and music first, can't really go wrong with that unless you play horrible music.

i then brought out the hookah, since manthan and brent were there i divided out the tasks. manthan packed the bowl while brent got water and i pretty much assembled everything. For some crazy entertainment i whipped up some bubble solution. i read some where that Dawn is the best soap to use but i can't be Ultra. But everything seems to be Ultra on the shelves these days. So i went ahead and used Palmolive. Another crazy thing to add to bubble solutions to make them stronger is glycerin. i spent like a day looking for glycerin and its impossible to find. All i could find at the pharmacy and food stores were glycerin suppositories...yeah, not really going to help me. i heard the next best thing is light corn syrup, but there is none of that in this house either so i just used a little bit of dark corn syrup.

For a bubble ring thingie i got a card board toilet roll. It worked pretty well. Something about bubbles and smoke, really entertaining. Just look at manthan's face. It's like he's seeing the coolest thing in the world.

i was pretty much the bubble machine that night.

i even caught a couple. You feel pretty cool when you have a bubble in your hand, especially when there is smoke in it. Its like i had my very own Rasengan...okay, maybe i geeked out a little too much there. C'mon, it kind of looks like a ball of concentrated chakra right?

Happy Memorial Day

Bust'n Out the Vieux Chateau Du Roi

While making these bottles of wine we have been alternating red and white wines. But that has been ruined and now two reds have been done consecutively. i've never had this grape before but i'm sure it can't be that bad. i mean, with a fancy name with that it has to be good. Right?

Mixing the benonite i used the fancy degasser. Made the job a million times easier. Well, taking pictures while stirring was still kind of a challenge.
i sprinkled the yeast in and put the lid on. Though when i put the air lock on top i pushed the seal through the lid so there was a leak that i was unaware of until a couple hours later...but now everything is good and its bubbling.
How could i forget brent, oh yeah...because he slept the whole time while i was starting the wine process. He snores too. i woke him up with the degasser, so that made up for it. The degasser has so many uses...

Beer Pong Legend

i did it. Finally got brent to play a game of beer pong, two games actually. Probably one of the best drinking games ever invented. Of course brent did not want to play, but we just watched Balls of Fury and i wasn't going to let a party pooper keep me from playing.

There is actually a special technique to the whole throwing of the ball. i could probably go on and on about all my little tricks to sink the ball in the solo cups but what it really comes down to is getting enough booze in your blood and a lot of luck. Oh and one more thing, just like the sights of a rifle before you throw you want to line up the ball and your elbow vertically and you'll pretty much improve your chances of sinking it by 50%. i just made up that number and that lining up thing probably doesn't do anything, but thats what i do and it makes me feel cool.

Even though brent was on my team we still won. i guess the opposing team wasn't very skilled but if it wasn't for my amazing pong skills we would have lost.

The Fridge

i was over at brent's again. He said he wanted me to come over to 'help' him vacuum... i don't care what he offered i wasn't going to vacuum anything. Then then said he had to fold his clothes and do the wash and said while he was doing that i should vacuum. Well if he didn't throw his clothes all over the floor he would be able to vacuum.

So we made a deal, i would clean out the fridge if he vacuumed. The fridge was worse than i thought. There were containers that were covered with plastic bags and all kinds of stuff were growing in them. i should have taken pictures of all the crazy stuff but i just couldn't look at them anymore and quickly threw everything in the trash bag as fast as i could. i did however get a shot of this delicious ziplock bag of broccoli and carrots, with mold.

The fridge also leaks, so there was a bunch of water all over the inside of it. i should have scrubbed everything down, but i was already feeling extremely dirty and just couldn't do it anymore. i'm going to have to have a bio suit or something for that. Or maybe even rent/build a robot that i can control remotely to go in and clean that ice box home to mold and fungus.

The Genesis

Well its been about six years now that we've owned and used our old grill. Its such a piece. It takes forever to cook something on it and its kind of tiny. It was about time we purchased a new grill. My dad got caught up with the char broil red grills, because they use infrared to cook your meat or something. Which is all fun and good but the metal they use to construct the grill is horrible and the grill will likely fall apart after a year. Weber grills have always been solid so we looked at their line. The have this Summit line which are just ridiculous because they're huge and pretty much 100% stainless steal...but they cost like 1700 bones.

The next line down is their more affordable Genesis line. They're cheaper because they don't have stainless steal all over the place. They also come in fun colors! My mom picked green. What momma wants is what momma gets. The grill got fired up for the first time the other day for some delicious burgers. The grill is awesome, cooked the cold patties in 10 minutes.

i'm going to cook everything on this grill now. i don't care what it is. What are we having, chicken? On the grill. What's that dano? you want a peanut butter and jelly? i'm making it on the grill. Hi acacia, want some cereal? Let me fire up the grill real quick.

No Handlebars

On my last long bike trip i forgot to leave my bike in first gear while stopped on a hill, my bike fell over and the fun ball at the end of my brake lever broke off along with the cap at the end of my grip. i don't know about everyone else, but once something breaks on my bike i'm just not as excited to ride it.
Since i'm retarded i failed to put throttle grip on correctly but i don't even like the grip so i'm not even going to bother with. i'll just buy the kuryakyn iso grips that everyone else has. The cool thing about the iso grips is that you can attach funky caps to them.

Since i'm like the 3rd owner of the bike i had no idea where to get a replacement lever. i went to order a stock one but it didn't look the same in the picture, so i searched online and found that kuryakyn had a similar one if not the same. Turned out it was the exact same lever and i didn't have to replace the clutch lever because they matched, less work for me woot!

Changed My Pipes

Somehow yesterday i got caught up watching videos of bikes on youtube. In most of the videos people were making a big deal of how loud their pipes where and how great it was to not have baffles. Prior to my motorcycle trip last year i put the stock pipes on my bike since my uncle threatened to make me ride a mile ahead or behind him since the cobra bikes that were currently on the bike would be too loud and make his ride less enjoyable.

Well i was really bored and i decided to put the cobra pipes back on, how do you like them apples?! Of course i had to use the dreaded allen wrench. Ugh, my most despised tool ever...some how i always hurt my hand using them. i made the horrible mistake of taking the cover off to the tool box in my bike, i spent like 20 minutes trying to put it back on and failed miserably. So i went back to taking the stock pipes off.
i forgot how heavy the stock pipes were...they're monsters while the cobra pipes are like 20 lbs less if not more. Plus i lost a few pounds so i bet my bike will really enjoy that. Might even get a mile or two more out of it...probably not. Anyway, i fired up the hog (bike) after i got the cobra pipes on and now its like a 10 times louder...maybe too loud. Now i can't sneak up on cars on the road anymore. Maybe thats a good thing. A couple more days it should be in the 70s and i'll be riding.

Lemonade

While walking around Philly the other day, it was during Penn Relays so there were a bunch of vendors out trying to see their goods. There were like a million Caribbean soul food vendors dishing out all kind of fried food and jerked chicken. Anyway, it finally hit me...What is pink lemonade? Like seriously, i really have no idea where it comes from. Like are there magical pink lemons that grow in a magical forest that only appear to those that are deemed worthy...a diamond in the rough perhaps? (Aladdin reference)

i can't even remember the last time i had pink lemonade. Does it taste different than regular straight up lemonade? Lemonade is already delicious, why would you make it pink? i just don't get it. What keeps me from making green or blue lemonade? i guess magical green and blue lemons are hard to come by...but what if i got my hands on some? i could make millions...

Like did a circus boy really drop some cinnamon red candies in his lemonade batch and make it pink? What about Crystal light? How the heck do they get their powder pink lemonade? i guess i'll never know...
Seriously, what is Northumberland trying to pull here? those lemons are clearly yellow...i don't see any magical pink lemons in that picture...

Mexicana

Not sure how this happens. But brent and i start talking about Mexicans, which lead to sombreros, and ultimately ended with tequila. So i got brent a sombrero and a bottle of tequila for this fantastic picture. Later, i found out that brent had never done a shot of tequila. What's that all about? Everyone has done a shot of tequila!

For this special occasion i even busted out my fancy shot glass with a skeleton dude wearing a sombrero in the center of it. A couple weeks prior to this, brent and i had done a shot of Everclear, it was brent's idea...but if you can do a shot of Everclear you can do a shot of anything. So the tequila did not even phase him. You have learned well young gwasshopper.

Creeks and Trees

The other day brent and i decided to check out the creek we use to explore when we were little. It just rained so the water level was kind of high and all the stepping stones were under water so we didn't take the old trek up stream.

In the picture below, i helped build the wall on the left, sort of. i helped pick out some of the rocks and maybe even a little cement work.
brent spotted this white stuff. Sure it looks like foam, but brent and i know its really alien larva and soon it will hatch and take over little kids brains.
if i ever get around to making a video about brent we'll be taping here with the sound of music playing in the background. Does that make sense? probably not...will that stop us from doing it? nope.
Of course brent and i had some delicious Lion's Head with us on our little adventure. Everything is more fun with booze in your hand.

Just Disgusting

Well its spring and the cottage has been opened up. The cottage is not very fun during the fall and winter as the water and electric is cut off and it turns into just a giant ice box. Through the years the cottage has just become a storage facility and rendered unusable. So i spent a couple days up there with the rents cleaning it out, hiding random furniture, and fixing a few things like the pocket doors to the bedrooms. The doors were too long and couldn't not close all the way. Probably one of the hardest things to do is removing a pocket door...

After a couple hours at the cottage i decided to head over to Brent's. i walked into his place, and i almost vomited. It was dirty, really dirty. Trash everywhere, clothes all over the place, and the something new this time...the smell. This rotten smell was just lingering in the kitchen area and i had no idea what it was.

Since i was still in my cleaning phase or because i have a severe case of OCD...i started cleaning. First was the beer bottles, then the pizza boxes, next was everything else gross... i even separated the recyclables from the rest of the trash. i ended up filling 4 bags with trash and 2 with plastics and glass.

The next feat was the clothes that just layer all the furniture and floor. i hung up as much as i could until i ran out of hangers and chucked the rest in laundry baskets. It took me about 2 hours to get all that stuff done. All i had to do next was pledge the furniture and vacuum. But brent said i couldn't or else i'd wake up the baby...So i never finished that. i even cleaned the sink and counter tops...As for the smell, i didn't notice it anymore...until i opened the fridge.

If i could imagine the smell of the insides of a tauntaun, thats what this smell was. It was intoxicating i almost passed out. The worst part is that i still don't know what was making the smell, there was barely anything in the fridge. The compulsive aroma quickly consumed the entire apartment and we were forced to open the sliding door to try and air out as much as we could. Looks like i'll need some kind of breathing apparatus to take on the fridge next time i'm in the cleaning phase. i should have taken some before and after pictures but i did not have my camera on me. So i'll just post a picture of brent, at his finest.

The Wind Chimes

Another new thing to the house, wind chimes. Some guy is making millions of dollars off these things that serve no purpose... The invention of wind chimes were probably an accident, because there is no way i could believe some one would spend time thinking something like this up. My theory is that this guy was building a metal puppet for the first time, and was getting so frustrated that he just chucked the whole project out the window. It then got caught on a hook that was used for a hanging flower pot, but the flower pot was not there because Junior just watched a Mexican cartoon and had the urge to hit a pinata. The metal puppet (which had no resemblance of a puppet) got caught on the hook and was freely blowing in the wind making chimes...

Pointless, annoying
Metal serving no purpose
The silly wind chimes

Creepy Water Fountain Girl Thing...

So my mom was in Home Depot the other day, and saw a ceramic fountain she wanted. So she bought it. Probably one of the more creepiest things if not the creepiest decor around the house. Well, nothing beats that demon pig, but this little mass murdering girl comes close.

Once i saw this thing i knew exactly why my mom wanted it. It was because it reminded her of her granddaughter. Of course this statue has way more hair and i'm sure that anna doesn't own any clothing even remotely close to the tacky get-up this thing has.

The fountain is really loud too. Just hearing it makes you want to pee, like really bad. i don't care if you just went you're going to pee again. So that's one of the new additions to the house.

Get Your Free Iced Coffee Today?

Its another one of those free things. At Dunkin' Donuts they're handing out free 16oz iced coffees. I've never been a huge fan of coffee, but i love iced coffee. Pick up a free iced coffee at a Dunkin' Donuts near you from 10am-10pm!

That's My Boy Blue

My favorite hookah has to be Blue. He's your typical rotating hookah and makes it so much easier to pass the hose around the circle...no crazy awkward maneuvering and what not.

It soon became a pain to set up old blue because the hose started to deteriorate because i decided it was a good idea to clean it with water and soap. i guess that time i got a mouth full of balsamic vinegar and blew it through the hose did not help either...took me forever to get that taste out of my mouth...

While in saudi i bought a replacement hose. The Anaconda...it of course came in blue. i tried finding a blue bowl but all i could find was brown and black...so black will have to do for now until i get some nontoxic paint. The hose is pretty good, its a little bit shorter than my last one but it has a huge handle on it so it takes less energy to smoke it. My kind of hose...the mouth piece is plastic so it will last for a long time.

The New Hubbly

While in Saudi, my mom was determined to buy me a new hookah because she thought my pumpkin one wasn't good enough and it was too much of a hassle to transport my nice one.

We stopped at this pretty old school store down town in Al Khobar. The guy didn't know any english but that didn't mean he didn't have a good selection. i had no say in which hookah we were going to buy, my mom saw the one she wanted for me two seconds in the store and wanted 3 of them. Of course the guy only had one so we got it. It was made in China.

The case has a lock and everything, its pretty ridiculous. Like i'm carrying money for some drug deal or something...
When you open this bad boy up its like you're assembling a sniper rifle or something. So crazy...the problem you run into when you buy a hookah that comes in a case is that it is usually machine made and you'll find that some parts don't fit well and you'll have leaks...but again, my mom wanted this one so it didn't matter what i said.

When picking out a hose, for some reason i picked the green one because i like green...not thinking that it would clash with the vase that was brown...i guess it won't bother me that much, hopefully. Maybe i could paint it?

i have only used this guy twice which was in Saudi, i have yet to use it in PA...

i did however buy some wood coals at that store, they're pretty sweet. You can really tell a difference, its a lot smoother and you can smell the flavored tobacco much better.

Mother's Day

For Mother's Day we went to the best buffet ever. The Hong Kong King Buffet. They pretty much have everything and more, and its delicious. We had a big crowd, my moms sisters, brothers, and their spouses...and brent and his family, and julie's b/f ben. 15 peeps.

Before we even sit down my mom had already gotten a plate with a massive crab on it. Those asians and their crab...they could eat their weight of it. i would eat crab but i'm just so lazy, can't they just pull the meat out of the shell for me? i guess not...

Below is my first plate. i ended up only having 3 plates, i told myself nothing that was filling but i just had to have some lo mein, and those fried dumplings...ugh they get me every time.
Julie decided to try sushi for the first time, and failed. She didn't even get it near her mouth, so she just played with it instead...what a trooper.

Nothing in the buffet phased Ben, and here is ben...being ben...

Brent only got 3 plates in as well...we obviously didn't train enough for this outing to the Hong Kong King Buffet. i forgot that there is a reason its called King Buffet.