I write, occasionally

About a year and a half ago, my father-in-law, Jeff, gave me a studio flash kit. You've seen them; the white umbrella-flashes that photographers have. Well, Jeff had one that'd been sitting in storage for years. It looked like it had never, ever been used. So one day he offered it to me and I accepted. I thought, "wow, this could be really fun to play with." I could setup a little portrait studio for a costume party or something... Awesome.

So I brought it home, put it away, and never got it out again, haha.

Fast forward til this Christmas - Kari got me a fancy new camera. Shortly afterward, I dug through storage and got the flash kit out. Once I got it all setup and figured out it worked like it was brand new I thought, …

Des Moines has come a crazy long way in the past 5 years. But there are still 2 very important things that I think it's missing.

1. Basic Shopping Downtown (groceries, hardware)

I live in Ankeny. My house is 1 mile from Target, Menards, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, a whole slew of restaurants, and soon - a Best Buy. Within 3 miles I've got a Dahl's, a Hy-Vee, 2 Fareways, and you can pretty much double the bars and restaurants.

Basic shopping and dining just doesn't get much more convenient.

I mean, don't get me wrong, Ankeny is definitely lacking in locally owned establishments - as it's mostly chains. We also don't have a place to get a martini, and we definitely don't have a venue for shows. BUT picking up groceries or some other …

Let me start off by saying that this may not be the absolute right way to manage your money, but it's definitely the best way for us; it's simple, it keeps us happy, and it keeps us responsible... so I wanted to share it. Hopefully it'll work for someone else.

Everyone knows that money management can be a real stressful thing for any couple (and single person, I guess). In fact, Kari and I's marriage counselor, Dr. Don Gilbert, told us 3 years ago, that the 3 most common things that break up marriages are money, sex, and communication. And not that any of you care, but we got the second two on lock.

So Dr. Gilbert gave us all sorts of amazing money tips. Most were pretty straight forward; there were some stories about buying …

Well, 2008 seemed to suck pretty bad for a lot of people. The economy, floods, etc. It was a rough time. I gotta say though, aside from gas prices, 401k losses, and a missed job opportunity, mine was pretty damn good. And our new year's eve celebration also bounced back to being good this year.

See, the last 2 NYEs have sucked pretty bad. We stuck around Des Moines, hoped for random craziness (like we'd gotten in Chicago the 2 years before that) and instead got relaxed, uneventful nights. I don't think NYE is supposed to be relaxed. It's supposed to be a celebration. Celebrate the good things that happened the past year, and also celebrate in hopes of an even better year. To me, celebrations of that scale, should be crazy, …

She cried, "more? more? more?"

So Kari got me a digital Rebel xsi for Christmas. For those of you who don't know what that is - it's a 12 megapixel digital SLR camera made by Canon.

I love taking photos. I love documenting life. And I've always said, that you should always have a camera to do just that. So it was an excellent gift.

Before yesterday, my "life documenting" camera was a 6 year old Sony DSC-F717. It was digital, 5 megapixels, fully manual, and you could attach lenses to it. So it was basically a Digital SLR wannabe. I even had it all outfitted with a remote, flash, tripod, fisheye lens, etc. And the thing was a freakin tank.

It's been soaked with blood after skidding through alleys with me. It's had beer …

Geez man. I am really bad at this.

It's been like 2 weeks now, but I definitely need to blog this event.

So yeah, a couple weeks ago we went over to Chicago for Amy and B Vaughan's wedding. We started by meeting our hotel roomie (Tara) at the Lisle Hyatt. You know, that long, skinny Hyatt that i88 almost runs into just outside of Chicago. So we got ready, and then took shuttles (great idea for the party that was about to take place) over to the wedding.

Kari was, of course, super excited to see her friends... and I have to admit I was too. Kari at weddings is hilarious. She can hardly contain herself during the ceremony because she's so freakin excited for the reception.

So the wedding and reception were at this place in …

This past weekend, Kari and I flew down to Texas to visit my sister and Chris. We've never really hung out with just the 2 before, so it was nice to finally get to visit - just us.

And as an extra bonus - travel was crazy smooth. NWA didn't charge us for checking bags (in fact we could've each checked an extra bag if we wanted), plus we got free sodas, and 1 of our flights even landed 30 minutes early, nice!

So anyway, we got into San Antonio late Thursday said some words, then we all basically crashed.

Friday, Halloween, we took Daniel to a pumpkin patch and then checked out the new house that Bre'anna and Chris are building. It is stupid nice. And yeah, I'm a bit jealous that my younger sister has a nicer house than I do. …

Man, my weeks are getting so busy that it takes til thursday to blog about the past weekend, ha. Or maybe it's because I actually work at Red 5 and can't blog at work like I used to. Either way, it's a good thing. But I do sorta feel bad for not journaling as well.

So anyway, as you may have gathered from photos or tweets, Kari and I visited Mt Vernon last Friday for Cornell Homecoming. And on top of homecoming, it was also my "5 year college reunion." Yeah, we have college reunions at Cornell and yeah that is funny... but - I love visiting that school. Especially when people I know are there. And that, there was.

All the familiar faces basically put me into happy friend mode. Nearly everyone that I recognized from college, …

I forgot to mention, aside from tweets and photos, that Kari's parents were in town last weekend to visit and do some early birthday celebration for Kari.

We started out saturday by brewing our first batch of beer since... last december (wtf). During our 10 month homebrew drought, we made some major plans to upgrade our process and do our first "full boil." So we spent most of the day running around and getting supplies for this fancy brew. We found everything we needed - except for 1 item. We couldn't, for the life of us, find a freakin high output propane regulator. *sigh* So we resorted to our typical partial boil on the stove.

I was a bit sad to revert to the stove, but we made a porter, and we still upgraded our process a …

Kari and I's buddy, Steph, recently bought a place in Chicago - a really nice place right downtown. Last Friday was her condo-warming party and we of course couldn't miss it. So we planned the trip and everything fell into place. Family was in town for Elias' baptism, and our Chicago friends were ready to party. There was much visiting to be done.

So Friday we rolled to Steph's, which was quite an awesome place. Very nice decor, paint, location, atmosphere - an all around nice place to live. I'm both happy for and jealous of her, ha.

The party was good too. There was a ridiculous amount of food and probably 30 people. It was really nice to see the Froehlich's, however I was a little sad when Dr. Bob and Cheryl left so early. …

I'm not going to say anything profound in this article. I'm sure all of this stuff has been said, but this time, it's coming from me... and as you probably know, I'm not into politics - at all. I've never followed them, nor have I paid attention to them. In fact, I've always said that, until a presidency is directly affecting my daily life, I have no reason or need to vote. ...I realize that both of those statements can be argued, and they have been... but that has been my reasoning.

Basically, I've chosen to be politically ignorant - and I do not think that misinformed, underinformed, or ignorant people should be voting, whether it's their right or not. I've always trusted that the majority of Americans, who are (hopefully) …

I sorta feel like I could sue someone's pants off Napster style, but obviously I'm not going to try; because I like Harper and I like Metallica.

So let me explain.

I bought the new Metallica CD today - Death Magnetic. And once I got it, I immediately opened the CD up and started flipping through the coffin booklet... which sort of resembles a hairy vagina on the cover, but that's beside the point.

There's a die-cut coffin through the entire booklet of album art and with each page, the coffin gets smaller and smaller. All of the pages have fancy, professional photos along with lyrics to the songs. It's really a great booklet. The album art is really well done.

Once you get to the last page - the bottom of the coffin - there's a bright …

I love maps. I've always loved maps. I love seeing the places I've been on a map, crossing places off, and planning where I'll go next.

When I was a little kid, my grandma always gave me a calendar/planner from my grandpa's company. It was one of those little yearly pocket calendar things the size of a checkbook, you know. Well every year, I immediately opened it up to the map page (in the back) and highlighted the states I had been to. I did the same with ski resort brochures - highlighting all the trails I'd conquered - wondering when I'd have the courage to highlight those black diamonds.

I really love the perspective that maps give you.

I've also always loved photos. When new people came to my house as a kid, I pulled …

So, most of you know that in our house, we celebrate birthmonths rather than birthdays... and now that my 27th birthday month is officially over, I figured it's safe to go ahead and blog about what's been up.

My actual birthday is August 5th, however this year it officially started June 22, haha. See, if you know my wife, you'll know that she absolutely sucks at keeping secrets and hiding gifts. She gets so damn excited about the gift that you pretty much get it immediately - and if not, she'll ask you every day if you want to open your present.

So, that said, on June 22nd, Kari pulled into the driveway from Target and immediately handed me a Nintendo Wii. Happy (early) birthday! haha.

I'm pretty stoked to finally have a Wii, …

I am an awful blogger. I haven't even talked about having a birthday yet, heh. But first, let's talk about tubing.

Last weekend, Nathan setup our 2nd tubing trip. He set one up for us last year, which was quite a blast. This year we had even more people and it was just as fun - maybe more fun.

Tubing was, of course, chaos. It seemed like there were way more partiers on the river this year. I haven't been to Apple River before, but it seems Rock-n-Row is moving in that direction. I mean, the freakin camp ground employees pulled out a beer bong at noon.

But yeah, during the float we drank this crappy beer we found in town called Beer:30. It came in a 30 pack of course... so we picked up 2, which meant we had Beer:60. So …

So, Josh's wedding was last weekend and I was fortunate enough to be a part of the ceremony. Jeff, Nathan, and I actually all got to stand in it, which is awesome.

The rehearsal was Thursday evening, so Jeff, Iulia, Nathan, and I drove up that morning - straight to Front Street Bar and Grill in Morgan. We each had a couple beers then went over to the church for the rehearsal. Rehearsal was pretty smooth despite the 18 person bridal party - seriously... 18 people.

Then after rehearsing we stocked up at this liquor store across from the casino called The Ditch. We had never been there before - in fact it was brand new, but as we walked in the owner shouts at Nathan, "Hey, I've seen you on the internet!" Turns out the guy plays …

This event is ridiculous - and not necessarily in a good way. I remember the first year I went - in 03 I was pretty excited about such an "urban" music festival. But at that point, I was a bedroom DJ myself, fresh out of college, and had never been to a real music event like lollapalooza - or even 80/35. I know, bad comparison, but still. I'm comparing success to - not success.

How do you expect an event to be successful if you can't pay any of your acts? You scrape up enough cash to cover the cost of the event and fly in a headliner... but everyone else... how do you expect reputable, good DJs to come out and perform when you can't even throw them $100?

Everything at 515alive this year was unorganized. Did you see a map …

Last weekend my buddy Turbo had a "He-Man Woman Hater" party. When he first told me about it I was like, "huh... cool name, Aaron." I figured he'd made it up, but it turns out it's a real club from The Little Rascals. The He-Man Woman Haters Club was... wait for it... a club of boys that hated girls. You know the "No girls allowed" sign on the treehouse? Yeah.

So basically, it meant that Turbo was having a dude party. Cigars, beer, grilling large cuts of meat, ya know. But he put an amazing twist on it. His invite said, "Aaron got a new humidor. Help him stock it! Bring a cigar for you and one to share." An amazing, amazing idea. You guys can all do this for my upcoming birthday party. ;)

Anyway... Zach, Ninja, and I …

So last night at 3:00am I woke up, looked over and swore that my buddy Nathan was in my bed. I sat there for 5 minutes - out of it - trying to figure out wtf was going on. Why is Nathan in my bed? Why is Kari not in my bed?

Apparently the back of Kari's head looks sorta like Nathan's when it's dark and 3am. So I sat there, trying to figure this out - sort of realizing that I'm retarded, it's obviously dark, and Nathan is not in my bed.

Finally, I came up with a brilliant idea to solve the mystery once and for all. I grabbed the person in my bed's ass.

It was Kari's ass.
Whew.

Are you kidding me? This name RULES. It's hilarious, true to Iowa, and... well it's the IOWA CHOPS, haha. How can you seriously not like that?

I'm already tired of all the groaners. How many times since they announced the name 18 hours ago have I heard "no wonder Iowa has a bad name" and "this doesn't represent Des Moines" or "why not the Iowa Hicks?"

They are called the Iowa Chops, not the Des Moines chops. What does Iowa do well? Farm and educate. We could've been the Iowa Schoolers I guess...

"it's a good name in the tradition of the brewers, packers, pistons, etc," said my friend MH. Great point.

So anyway, I'm obviously stoked.

Ticket prices are cheaper, The logo rules, the name is hilarious, and we're an …