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Weekend with Doody

Well, its Monday and I’m back from Bangor. Amme, Jalb, and I went down to meed Doody on his way up from Albany. A wonderful time was had all around, and it was really nice to hang out all hang out together– We never get to do that anymore.

I’m not going to “Wal*Mart” for a LONG time. Know what the “*” stands for on the sign? Its where they edited out “F***ING”. I’m so sick of Wal *BEEP* Mart right now. Hell, we went there almost every day last semester, because Amme is just funny like that, but this weekend we went about 3 times a day, and thats just depressing.

We painted every day, some days more than others, and managed to finish the living room and almost finished the bathroom and Amme and I’s bedroom. We got more paint and rollers and tape. I can’t thank Jalb and Doody and Amme enough for all their help. In between painting we did a lot of stuff though. We played a lot of Texas Hold-Em and Crazy Eights. Jalb forgot his nice clay chips at home and we couldn’t find any poker chips at WalMart so we bought ziti noodles and they ended up working pretty well, except we had to keep them in bowls so they wouldn’t roll off the table.

We shampooed the carpets and when we rented the unit the lady didn’t know how to fill out the form so that took about 20 minutes. When we returned it they said we needed our receipt to refund the deposit, which the lady had neglected to mention to us when we rented it. We had to drive all the way back to our place to get the stupid slip of paper. Jalb asked where the hand-held radio scanners were and they told us they didn’t carry them. We knew they did in Presque Isle so we checked automotive anyway and lo and behold, there the little bastards were right with the car stereos. He bought one, only to have it not take manual frequencies when the package said it did, so he returned it and got a cheaper, MUCH better one from Radio Shack.

I have to say, I hate going to Radio Shack because they are always so pretentious and assholes about everything, but this one salesman at the one in Brewer was amazing. He was all smiles and very helpful and talked about all the features with Jalb and even offered to take it out and put batteries in the one he was buying to test it out. He bought it along with a $5 adapter the guy gave him for free, and to top that all off, he went out back and got a list of all the popular frequencies for the area. I was thoroughly impressed, and from now on, that’s the only Radio Shack I’m going to. After cooking up some of my special spaghetti sauce with much help from Amme, and mauing down, we went out to take night photos (our favorite) at Bangor International Airport (BGR).

On our way into the airport, we saw a blue and white tail-design sticking out from behind the terminal, and it turned out to be an Antonov Design Bureau plane! Don’t crucify me, I’m still new at aircraft identification, but I believe it was an Antonov An-124 Ruslan. We found out that the planes were landing on the end of the runway that ended at a public road (bottom of this picture), so we parked there and waited. We ended up having two or three planes come in, and they were BIG. I don’t remember what Jalb decided they were, but I’ll find out when he once again joins the living (he didn’t come in to work today, that bad boy). It was so loud and exhilarating, and we got some great wake turbulence! We also caught a jet taking off but it was too dark to see, too fast to use a high shutter priority, and too far away to use a flash.

We went out again the next day to take some daytime photos, and found some great shortcuts around Bangor. We stumbled across a playground and decided to play for a while. Amme and I swung on a tire swing and got very dizzy.

I don’t remember which day, but we took more night shots around Bangor and got a few really good ones. On our way into town, we saw a tall church casting a shadow in the sky. This is one of my favorite shots:

Theres an overall sense of impending doom, and them standing there with their paintlegs unknowingly stuck on their shoes, mirrored, is priceless to say the least.

My memory is blury, but at some point we fed seagulls fries from Wendy’s, saw a 3 foot long nurse shark, made stirfry, saw a C-5B Galaxy?, and watched an Omni air International DC 10 take off.

We also wandered around Borders trying to get free WiFi on Jalb’s powerbook, but it said we needed a T-mobil account and the software was only for Windows. They said there were booklets about how to connect, but they had run out so we ended up leaving with some periodicals. Today Kevin told me all you have to do is put in the username and password and its free, but those are in the booklets. He thinks they are “Borders” and “Bangor” respectively. You don’t need to d/l the connection manager on the Mac because, as always, it ‘just works’.

We had an amazing time and I can’t wait to get us or more of us together again. I leave you with Doody’s centerfold picture for 2004.
You can see all the pictures at http://euicho.com/pics/doodjalb/