March 24-28, 2014

This week actually went by really fast.  Spring break ended and I was depressed, now its friday and I am happy once again.  This weekend is sure to be a busy one, seeing as I have a lot of family events I have to attend.  My grandma's birthday is sunday so I have to help make her dinner and then go to my aunt and uncle's house for my little cousins birthday.  Gotta love conflicts in schedules.  The big thing I'm waiting for is my birthday.  I am (hopefully) getting a nice pair of White's boots from my parents which would make me sooooooo happy.  They're pretty expensive boots but they last a long time and can be repaired for free whenever something on them breaks or rips or falls apart.  They're just super comfortable, durable and all around great boots.  I really need a new pair to have this summer for work, seeing as its almost a given that you need a good pair of boots to work on a road maintenance crew.  I spend a lot of my time in a pickup driving through the county and spraying weeds, fixing signs, flagging while the roads are being chip-sealed (similar to asphalt paving).  The worst days are chip-sealing for sure.  We do it right at the end of august basically when its super hot, we stand on a hot road in the sun all day wearing jeans and high visibility vests. It's nice for a day when it's different than spraying weeds all day, but after that its just hot, messy, and terrible.  The chip-seal just sticks to everything too, the oil they put down is extremely sticky so the gravel chips stick to the existing road surface.  That also makes the rock stick to your tires, vehicle and everything else that touches it, so your shoes get ruined if you walk in it, which is what I do all day.

March 21, 2014

I went to Elk River today to help my grandparents take some couches to their cabin there.  The snow is about three to four feet deep there, but it's such old snow that it's basically ice at this point and you just walk along the top of it.  Dallan and I had to carry a hide-a-bed up a flight of stairs into their upstairs living room area.  Those hide-a-beds are heavy as shit.  It didn't help that I threw out my shoulder yesterday pull starting my friends four-wheeler (like how you have to start a lawnmower but way harder).  Holy hell my shoulder hurts now.  Along with my knees from riding yesterday I am just miserable right now.  On top of all that I was going to go on a nice date tonight but that fell through too, but no big deal that just means pizza and a poker night with my friends!

March 20, 2014

Today I went riding for the first time in awhile.  I went out to viola and loaded up my grandpa's four wheeler into the back of my pickup and came back to town for a couple hours while I waited for my buddy to get his four wheeler running.  I also had to buy sixty dollars worth of gas since my rig was running low and I had to fill the four wheeler up.  The ride itself was pretty fun.  We rode through snow, mud ( a lot of mud), water, more mud, more snow and some more mud.  I got stuck when some of the hard snow we were riding on broke and my rear tires sunk into about two feet of mud and mucky water.  It wasn't hard to get out of but I got covered in the damn mud.  We actually got snowed on for a good hour, we eventually decided to pack it all up and head back.  When I was unloading my grandpa's four wheeler from the back of my pickup when I was returning it I almost flipped it over.  I gotta say that was pretty terrifying.

March 19, 2014

My birthday is exactly a month from today, fun fact of the day.  Today I pretty much did nothing other than sleep a lot and take Dallan to the mall to buy an xbox one since his car is in the shop.  It's there because it got hit and run a couple of weeks ago.  It was in pretty bad shape too, needs a new hood and front fender.  I listened to a lot of music too.  I think I just put a playlist on and listened to like 150 songs or so, it was nice to just zone out and listen to some tunes for awhile.  I have been getting back into my country music lately since the weather is getting nice.

March 18, 2014

Today I finally got to wash my pickup and clean the entire thing out.  I spent a good hour washing it and getting all the winter muck and magnesium chloride off of it.  Then I dried it and began work on the inside.  I had a lot of trash, random tools and clothing items throughout the cab.  I then took the floor mats out and washed them off.  Once my rig was completely dry I waxed it. At this point I had been working on my rig for around two and a half hours.  After I finished waxing it I got the shop vac out and vacuumed as much of the interior as i could get to.  I reorganized everything that I needed to keep in the cab and added some supplies.  I put my toolbox back in, my first aid kit, my gallon of emergency water, half a gallon of motor oil, and some other stuff.  Then I decided while I was at it I would polish my chrome, there is a lot of chrome on my pickup.  It took about another hour.  Once everything was all said and done I had spent four hours washing, waxing, vacuuming, reorganizing, polishing and detailing my pickup.  I felt pretty good.

March 17, 2014

Day one of spring break.  I went to the rec center and worked out for a bit.  I made an attempt at washing my pickup but before i could do it the weather got cold.  I also went fishing for carp in lewiston yesterday to no avail.  These carp are so lazy they won't even go after a baited hook.  You literally have to get a giant hook and maneuver it toward the carp and then pull the rod back hard and manually hook the carp.  Their scales are about the size and almost thickness of your thumbnail if not bigger.  The suckers can get up to about 30 pounds.  unfortunately we could not hook one.

March 7, 2014 another long one

The game was all us for the first half then they came back and tied it. We kicked a 3 point field goal and the score was 17-14 us.  Lakeland scored a touchdown and it was 21-17 them.  We had about two minutes left on the clock.  A lot of the seniors and younger guys who were on the sideline looked defeated, but the other starters and I knew we could do it.  We started at our 20 yard line and drove the ball (with the help of a few penalties on lakeland) to Lakeland's 30 yard line.  With about 15 seconds left on the clock on a long 4th down (our last try before lakeland would get the ball back) we tried a pass play.  I worked hard to block my guy from getting to the quarterback and on a quick look back I could see Kyle (our Quarterback) was scrambling to make time for the receivers to get open.  I hit my guy hard and knocked him down so Kyle could throw, and he chucked it deep for the end zone.  Keep in mind this all happened in about 5 seconds.  The ball looked like it was going to be intercepted by the lakeland defender and all of a sudden Alex (one of our receivers) came out of nowhere and grabbed the ball out of the air for a touchdown.  We were now in the lead by three after the extra point kick.  We kicked the ball off with ten seconds remaining in the game. Lakeland returned the kick about 20 yards and took 9 of the 10 seconds off the clock giving them one last chance to make an 80 yard play to score and win.  They weren't able to pull it off and we won and were heading to the state playoffs. Moscow hadn't been there in 15 years so we were a big deal.  We then hosted Bonneville from twin falls for the first game of the playoffs, it was a muddy and cold game in moscow that we ended up losing 18-6 which ended the season.  I was happy we hosted it though, I wanted to have one last game at Bear Field.  After the game I sat in the bleachers and just kind of reminisced about the six years of football I played there for about an hour until the lights got shut off. You would probably never see emotion from me and the guys in my class like you would have seen in the locker room after that game.  We all finally realized that once we took our equipment off we would never put it on again.  Most of us were either blank faced and staring at the floor or crying uncontrollably, primarily the latter.  We all got to have our time to say a few words to our team mates and coaches. It was definitely hard to take that uniform and those pads off. I have so many memories on that football field, and I definitely would do anything to strap the pads on one more time and play for my town and to play with my best friends again.

March 6, 2014: This one's a long one.

This will be a two parter:

After seeing stuff about the state wrestling and basketball tournament that old teammates of mine are/were going to it really made me miss sports in high school.  I definitely took them for granted for the first few years of high school.  It took me all the way to senior year to realize that I really don't want to take them for granted.  Everyone says that once you get to senior year you realize how time has flown and to enjoy every minute of sports you play, I never really bought it till I was playing my last football game.  Nothing was more fun that playing football for me and all the training that came with it.  The season wasn't all that good, we were a talented and good team but we kept losing close games.  A couple were decided by one point and a couple others were decided by one touchdown.  We did beat our district rivals though.  One of them, Sandpoint, was a team we had a lot of trouble beating in the past.  My sophomore year we lost to them in double overtime by a field goal which sent them to the state playoffs rather than us, then my junior year we beat them by scoring a touchdown on a 85 yard drive.  We got the ball with about a minute and a half left and then scored with about 8 seconds left.  We could have kicked an extra point and tied it to go to overtime but we had nothing to lose since lakeland (our other district rival) was going to state seeing as they beat us and sandpoint already so we went for a two point try.  We scored it by throwing a little jump pass to the back of the endzone and with that we took the lead by one.  The next kick took the last 8 seconds and we won.  It was a bad season but the end was so good, we hadn't beat sandpoint in close to 8 years.  Then senior year happened.  We lost our first four games, then played a team from canada here at the kibbie dome.  We won in a blowout and played some great football, we then lost the next game to lewiston by one. We then traveled up to sandpoint for our first district game.  We completely blew sandpoint out of the water, my mom is the athletic trainer for moscow and has been for awhile and she had never seen moscow beat sandpoint up there.  The next week Lakeland came to our house to play us for the championship game.  Lakeland was 5 and 2 we were 2 and 5 in the win/loss column.

I'll continue in the next post.

March 5, 2014

Today I really just don't know what to type.  I guess I'll just talk about the song that's been stuck in my head all day.  Mostly it's been "Truck Yeah" by Tim Mcgraw.  It's not exactly the best song but I really like it because of the way the actual instrumental part of the song sounds.  Also it has a lot of memories to it as well.  It takes me back to senior year of high school football.  When we were getting ready for practice we would blast that song through the sound system we had set up in our locker room.  Our coach always would come in and dance around with us during that song, it was always a good time and a great way to set the mood high for practice since no one really wanted to be there at first.

March 4, 2014

Right after school gets out I get to start going to a bunch of concerts and working again.  It will be so nice to get back to my job spraying weeds and other road maintenance for the county.  There are a lot of things that I need some money for.  I have a few touches I need to add to my pickup and about 3-4 concerts to go to.  Its definitely going to be a nice off time from school this summer.  I am so tired of the day to day sitting in class and doing homework.  I like just going to work for the day, coming home and then going and doing what I want.

March 3, 2014

Just decided what my next major purchase will be.  There's an album that I have been anticipating since it was announced last fall called "Strangeulation" which is a Tech N9ne Collabos album which is an album where Tech N9ne collaborates with a lot of other artists basically making a big showcase album.  In this case it is an entirely Strange Music album where all 15 Strange Music artists are together and making this album come together.  It's called Strangeulation for that reason. It means the act of strange music collectively having the music industry in a chokehold.