A few weeks ago, Josh, Jeff, and I went camping at Lake Okoboji. We booked a campsite in a completely unreserved loop in the back of a state park and had the entire area to ourselves... which is always a good idea when our group gets together.

The trip was great. Bullshitting. Disc golf. Swimming. Driving the topless Jeep around the lake. Night hikes. Cooking over fires. Beer. Hanging just like old times.

But this story is about Saturday night.

The skies were clear and there was a full moon. So naturally, every time one of us caught a glimpse of the moon we’d belt out a big ol wolf howl… and as you can imagine, the other two would follow suit like normal ~40 year olds. It was good that we were in that loop all by ourselves.

So, we …

And now for a story about Josh and I geolocating a random YouTube video - and how I'm amazed by how easy it was.

So, this all starts with a conversation with my dad over the recent snowfall we've been having... He tells me about this Toro Power Shovel thing, which sorta looks like a vacuum sized, cheap snowblower. My dad said that he was super skeptical of this power shovel, but he tried it out and wound up being thoroughly impressed.

Soon after, I passed this info onto my buddy, Josh. He's gotten around 3 feet of snowfall this winter, so he was immediately interested. We discussed how dumb the power shovel looks but started reading reviews and looking for videos of it in action (such as this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkJ8L…

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 …

Bachelor parties with my buddies and I are a little different than what you expect from a normal bachelor party.

We don't really do the whole stripper thing, mainly because strip clubs are sort of played out. I mean, I guess people go to strip clubs on bachelor parties to remind you that there are other naked (and sluttier) bodies out there... and how you can't have those anymore. It sort of fits the bill, but whatever. Strip clubs aren't really a ton of "fun" so... we don't do that.

Instead, we basically just celebrate. We drink more than we should and run around like we own the place. You could say that we just act like college students, but richer.

So anyway, Jeff, Chuck, Nathan, and I headed up to Morgan, MN on Friday to …

It has taken me 4 days to build up the energy to blog about last weekend, seriously.

Friday, Josh and Jeff were supposed to meet up at my house at 6... 6:30 at the latest. However when Josh told me that he wanted to take a route that he had never been (while attempting to never touch an interstate), I knew it'd be bad. At one point he was talking to me after he'd crossed into Iowa, 15 minutes later he called again and was back in Minnesota. Later in the trip he got lost again, but his cell phone was dead so he called, while plugged into the ceiling of a gas station. He finally showed up around 7:30. Wingert is never on time, no matter what. He got there around 9 and was immediately greeted with a snowball to the ear.

So …

Welp, as most of you know, Nathan, Chuck, and I went up to Minneapolis this weekend, which started out as a birthday bash for Josh, but ended up being a celebration of all our birthdays. Mine's in August... Nathan's is in June, and Chuck's is in November, haha.

On the way, we ended up making a last minute pitstop into Clear Lake to pick up Monica and drop her off at her BF's place just outside of the cities.

We got to our hotel around 9ish, which was in a pretty rough part of downtown - greyhound station, dudes getting handcuffed, etc. Actually we saw people getting cuffed on 3 separate occasions right in front of our building, haha.

So, we quickly threw our stuff in the room and walked straight to Gluek's bar. As soon as we …

Omg, this weekend was totally crazy - I loved it. I wonder how long I would live if all my friends lived closeby...

Anyway, Friday, Rich, Sean, Jeff, and Josh came into town for my bachelor party. We all headed up to Rico's to grill out, etc. They made an awesome meal for all 16 of us (it was a great base for the night we had - it definitely worked). We played monster golf, bocce, poker, etc. The rest of the night was absolutely crazy, here it is in list format... The bus picked us up, we went to the Cab, Lift, Royal Mile, Red Monk, Aura, Third Base, Cabaret, etc.

The night included: running, dancing, punching contests, slapping contests, running over minivans, getting interviewed by some TV station, playing with the …

Ok, so I have been working on "tagging" everything on my site sort of like flickr and gmail tags things. It's nicer for searching/browsing my site. For instance if I want to find a bunch of stuff about Kevi, I check out the Kevi tag or for skating I can check out the skating tag. I also made my tags page look sort of like flickr's popular tags page. The more of a certain item there is, the bigger the text. Rule. Obviously there are a lot of pictures with me in them on this site, ha.

In addition to tagging I used mod rewrite to make all my URLS nicer. Instead of links like /?pictures&album=77&pic=1172 they are now like like /photos/tech-n9ne-and-richs-26th/1172/. It's much prettier... for me anyway. The only problem is that …

omg. I'm so busy, it's retarded. Like, it is seriously bringing me down like mad... and now that all my friends are moving here/visiting, it makes it even harder. For the next 3 weeks I'm not hanging out with anyone, haha. So don't ask! (except when I go to Mt Vernon and Chicago)

So besides that, this weekend ruled. Thursday I went to a show at Vaudeville. Luke (aeon Grey) rapped, Soulcrate was awesome, and RSK was not good... well at least their DJ wasn't.

Josh was in town this weekend, so Friday we all met a Champps for a couple drinks, then Nathan, Chuck, Josh, and I ran around Ankeny, saw some band that was good at Roadhouse. We got stopped by cops cause josh tried to wiggle a sign out while we were running past it, …

What a fun weekend. The days were sorta weird due to messed up sleep patterns. It kinda seemed like one long day. But anyway...

Friday, Kevi, Kari, and I drove up to Morgan to meet Josh Lueck for a Birthday Bash. We got to his house at 11:30pm, picked up Jolene and then met Josh at work (@ Jackpot Junction). Kevi and I played some Pai Gow poker, which is a really fun game and Kari found out that she hated casinos, which was funny. Once Josh got off work (@ 2am) we drove up to the cabin we'd be staying in at Leech Lake. On the way there we saw the temperature get down to 29 degrees, wtf. We got there at 7:30am and napped til about 1.

After that there was lots of hanging out with the family that owned the cabin. We played …