chewykolchuk.com

Hey folks, I’m in Bozeman.  Came out here for Sweet Pea Festival and niece’s birthday.  The internets out here is a little more difficult to come by as my sister in under the impression that she doesn’t believe in anything computer-related.  So I’m finally at a wifi coffee joint, doing all things cyber-related for the other family members….sending emails, changing seating assignments on homeward flights, etc…

I got a call from my friend Kate yesterday.  She didn’t know I was out of town and her greeting was something like, “So are you safe?”  I thought, what the hell?  As it turns out, she drove by the house I live in and the whole block was choked with firetrucks, ambulances, cops, and there was a huge cloud of smoke billowing up into the air.  ???  Holy crap, yeah,  I’m just fine here in Bozeman!  So to make a long story short, the house/business that is 3 houses down from us, a flower shop, burned down, but my place is fine.  Good thing too, cuz I wasn’t there to be able to save my bike and my guitar.

Close one!!!

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We went disc golfing  a couple days ago.  I’d been golfing in Seattle before, but I’d never been to an 18-hole course, just the 9-hole ones.  Or, ONE.  You know how normal golf courses are nice and manicured, with beautiful views and all that?  Yeah…this is Alaska, folks, there will be none of that pansy shit.  In fact, this course was so overgrown and wild, I thought I was going to see Ewoks and Stormtroopers battling it out over a shield generator.  Whatever, it was a blast and we only lost 3 discs in the process.

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Day 5 consisted of a picnic, which was the final event of the 20th Reunion.  Zeno and I rode bikes to the event, which was about 15 or so miles and of course we were thirsty when we got there, so we got into more beer, and as it turns out, I’d found a full bottle of whiskey in my bag that I’d forgotten about.  Apparently we bought that along with the 2nd bottle of gin the night of the 3rd.  Oh boy….well, let’s get into that too, I suppose.  The picnic was a lot of fun as we got to catch up with all the old classmates in a more relaxed setting.  One consistent problem that everybody was having was that in the previous activities, alcohol was very much involved, and so I was having many of the exact same conversations with the exact same people because I couldn’t remember what we’d talked about before.  No problem…it’s kinda like this joke:  What’s the best thing about Alzheimers?  You get to meet so many new people.  Afterward, Zeno and I met up with Amie Hickok and her husband.  Amie and I shared a locker our senior year and she is a crack up.  Afterward, we took off and rode to Zeno’s house to crash out, which we did.

Waking up the next morning, I noticed that Lucy, Zeno’s cat, had been nice enough to leave her kill right by where I was sleeping on the couch.  The little blue birdie had been cute in its lifetime that’s for sure and it was a tiny little thing.  In addition to that, there were feathers from a different and MUCH larger bird strewn all about the house.  If the blue birdie was about 4 or 5 inches in overall length, the black feathers were themselves 4 or 5 inches long.  Zeno was walking around the house that morning, crooning to his kitty, “My little sweet sweetie is a killing machine.”  Even better though was when I looked over and saw that she was eating something.  She had it in her paws and was gnawing on it, the same way that a dog will go at a big soup bone.  Upon closer inspection, I could see that she was snacking on a dragonfly.  DAMN!  You go girl!

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SURE, I’LL TAKE A BREATHALYZER.

Days 3 and 4, which were Friday the 3rd and Saturday the 4th, connect for this story because they were pretty much the same day, since I never did go to sleep.  Zeno came over to the house and he and I went to the store for supplies.  The plan was that while there was a boat cruise scheduled for that evening, we were going to bail on that since we were pretty much broke and didn’t feel like taking part in that particular activity.  So we went to the store and good food for the day to cook at home and we stocked up on that and Bombay Sapphire gin.  We both felt like we’d already had too much beer in the previous two days so we switched it up.  Gin/tonics on a warm summer day is always nice, and we were going to go see the fireworks that evening in a parking lot downtown, so were in that mood.  FYI: Juneau has their fireworks display at midnight the night of the 3rd because you have to wait forever for it to get dark and if they did it on the 4th, they’d actually be doing it on the 5th.  That’s my theory anyway.

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THIS IS MY BEER.  THERE ARE MANY LIKE IT, BUT THIS ONE IS MINE!

Day 2, Thursday, went much the same as the previous day.  The reception for our reunion was that night, and I had decided that I’d wear a 70s outfit to it.  So I ironed my $2.00 polyester pants and my $1.50 baby blue thread-bare shirt, and we headed into town for that.  The great thing about having friends like Aaron and Zeno is that the energy level and the immature factor both spike right through the roof when all 3 of us are together, so while Zeno was taking a shower, Aaron and I had a photo shoot with Zeno’s kitty, where Aaron held her up as though he were showing off a prize-winning fish he’d just caught.

After arriving at the reception, it quickly became apparent that I’d horribly miscalculated my choice of attire.  Oh everybody loved that I was being goofy, and we all had a laugh about it, but the synthetic materials made for a very sweaty Chewy.  Firstly, remember in the 70s how a lot of guys would wear the puka shell necklaces?  I had one of those, but instead of shells, I was wearing a candy necklace like you get at the movie theater, or on Halloween.  So here I am sweating like a pig, and my necklace is grafting itself to my neck in a sticky, sugary mess, so I quickly got rid of that.  Then I realized that I was wearing modern, sweat-wicking underwear, but I was also wearing the old polyester sweat-generating pants, so my Bad-touch/Good-touch area was completely confused.  It was like I had matter in one pocket and anti-matter in the other and they were just DYING to touch and annihilate.  Note to self: Don’t EVER do that again.

As one might imagine, there was a lot of alcohol flowing, and everybody had a good time without any goofy drama happening, which I was kind of surprised at, since this is Juneau after all.  But afterward we all headed out to the bar.  I should say The Bar, because while there are a number of bars, the Imperial is the one that people go to now.  When I was 21, it was a place called the Penthouse, and then the Viking became popular, and now it’s the Imperial.  Whatever…now you know a little about Juneau if you’ve never been there.

That night ended much the same as the previous night, with me waking up the next day without a hangover (what is going on here?) and Zeno showing up early in the afternoon.  Standard Operating Procedure.  Little did I know…

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WELCOME TO ALASKA, YOU HAVE BEEN ISSUED YOUR CASE OF RAINIER

Hello there Internets, how have you been?  Me?  Fine.  No, that’s not true.  While I’ve generally been excellent, I’ve also been putting myself through a week of such non-stop debauchery that I think I’ll refer to it as Non-stop Debauchery.

As both readers of this website are aware, I’m up in Juneau, attending my 20th high school reunion.  This coincides with the 4th of July weekend, and in addition to all that, I’m in AK, which means “Fuck Texas, Texas is for pussies…we know how to party, and our days are much longer, so put that in your pipe and shove it up your ass!”  I think I heard my liver say that one just before it passed out, but whatever…

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Well, it’s now Tuesday and I’m finally getting back to “human” status after the last weekend, which encompassed 4th of July as well as my 20th high school reunion.  I wrote some posts and they are sort of long-winded (what? here, me????) so I think I’m going to split them up into multiple posts, so enjoy.

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I enjoy xkcd.com. It’s a geek comic that I’m sometimes not geeky enough to get fully, but the person(s) in charge there are pretty seriously hilarious at times. Case in point…

source: www.xkcd.com

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Well, I was up until 5am, ripping apart the laptop.  As you can see, it was an interesting process, especially since I’m a bike mechanic and not a computer tech.  Basically that just means that while I understand screws and the importance of not stripping out threads, I’m very used to being incredibly dirty and greasy when I do so, so having to be ultra-careful in this process was quite stressful.

I’d say that if I were being graded on my performance, I may have passed and been allowed to attend Computer Tech 101, but I wouldn’t have passed my final exam.  Sure, the computer works (hey, I’m posting this from the very computer in question!) but the LEDs that light up the keys on the keyboard don’t light up no mo’, and there are still a couple of minorly sticky keys.  So I can still download porn, but not very efficiently in the dark, when I might not be able to see the keyboard.  Unlike most people born after 1990 or so, I can type without looking at the keyboard, but I have to find the J and the F keys before I start composing a true masterpiece, zeemzane?

At any rate, I’m back up and running and I only suffered a minor heart attack in the process.  I’m told by 3 different people that if I hadn’t been trying to be “responsible” and had been drinking beer instead of a non-alcoholic drink, this surely would not have happened.  I’m inclined to believe that.  Mostly because I’m an idiot, but that’s another story.  Very extra special awesome thanks to Brent and Kate for having been home and able to let me borrow the miniature screwdriver set.

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So there I was, at the bar, knee-deep in a pint of Sprite, when my phone got all vibrate-y. As I am wont to do, I reached for the phone, but my arm hit the pint of Sprite, and spilled it onto my laptop. I was originally there for the food and the internets, but all of a sudden I was frantically shutting my computer down and blotting the very sticky, sugary beverage from the keyboard.

FUCK ME!

The computer is an Apple MacBook Pro, and as you can imagine, isn’t among the cheaper of computers out there, so I was a little agitated. As in, a shitload. But I calmly dabbed and blotted as much liquid as I could from the external surfaces, and promptly went home to see if I was out $2000 or not.

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