Category Archives: adventures

July 4, 2012 · 3:01 am

I’m In Oregon. Here are some things I’m learning.

As many you you may well know, I’m in Oregon training for a new job.

Quick FAQ:

  • No, I have not stopped acting.
  • No, I have not stopped producing.
  • Yes, we are still making movies and pushing TV & web series.
  • Yes, I am still teaching and coaching acting students.
However I will be working with a new company and I’ll release all the details on that once training is complete.
Actually some of you financial people might be interested in what I’m doing, especially if you’re an independent financial rep. But we’ll get to that on another day.
So, anyway, I’m in Oregon until the end of July to train. Training has been going well! My colleagues are great and so are my superiors and the company in general has been wonderful!

Oregon, as an experience, has been the harder thing to adjust to. Complete culture shift, weather shift and activity shift. For example:
  • It is very green here, but in a wild and un-groomed kind of way. Look at the pictures in this blog and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about.
  • It’s damp all the time. I was told that this is a rain forest, technically (Wikipedia says it’s the Pacific Temperate Rain Forest).
  • Because it’s damp all the time things smell damp all the time. This can be good, like wet wood and flowers, and this can be bad, like mildew. So far the good has out weighed the bad.
  • There is a LOT of space. Lots of it. Between houses and between cities.
  • Things that I’m used to having down the street are over 50 miles away. This has become a problem in a few ways, but we’ll come back to that.
Within the first week my friend, Erik, has shown me pretty much the whole of his little town. There’re grocery stores, Safeway and Fred Meyers (we’ve been shopping at Fred Meyers) and local restaurants and quite a few little dive bars that I wouldn’t dare call “dive” when inside.
I’ve had world famous clam chowder and cobbler at the Chowder Bowl on Nye Beach. It was REALLY good.

We are right next to the Rogue brewery, although I haven’t visited yet. And there’s a Mexican place called Mazatlan I really want to try.
But what I want to talk about today are bathrooms and condom machines.
Yes, you heard right, bathrooms and condom machines.
I’ll explain.
I mentioned the dive bars. We’ve actually had quite a bit of fun in the dive bars and some shockingly good food. Karaoke too, but let’s cover that later.
In the Men’s room of all these bars are condom machines. They look like this:

One side is condoms, but the other is a little package called the “Surprise Sex Pack.” 

There are only so many times you can see these before you’re curious about what kind of “Sex Pack” can fit in such a tiny package.

So I bought one. It’s an iron-on patch.

The scary part is that I’m sure that there are people out there who collect these sex patches.
There are so many things that I’ve seen so far, and I want to tell you about all of them, but I think it’s probably best to split them up a bit so this blog doesn’t end up being pages and pages long.
Oh, and for those of you looking for Project: Iron Man, that will be back in August.
See you tomorrow!

Leave a Comment

Filed under adventures, jobs, travel

March 10, 2011 · 7:56 am

Inspired By Hipsters

Rene and I had lunch in the Max Bloom’s Cafe Noir today based on a recommendation from our friend Peter James Smith about their grilled cheese sandwiches.  It’s right in the heart of Downtown Fullerton and I’ve passed it several times but never actually stopped in or even really noticed that there was even a cafe there.  Technically it is a coffee shop that serves food, but that is hardly a bad thing.  It is something that I like to call a “Hipster Haven,” a place where things are cool for the sake of being cool and the folks who frequent it are the kind of folks that “get it.”  Bloom’s totally fits the bill.  The 40’s noir theme is wonderfully executed across the board right down to a faux radio cover for the air-conditioning box.  As soon as we walked in we noticed two things: 1) it was as quiet as a library and 2) everyone had Apple Power Books (the Hipster accessory of choice).  We felt a bit out of place.

I used to wonder if I would ever be a hipster.  I like obscure things, there was a time when “I liked things before they were cool” and I pride myself on “getting” things but I can’t grow facial hair (it’s physically impossible), I don’t wear glasses and I never wore vintage clothes.  It’s a bit of a toss-up. Being in the cafe today kinda’ confirmed for me that I’m a bit past the point where I could reasonably be a Hipster.  Regardless of my personal “hipster-dom” and for how quiet the cafe was, the food was great!  We got the grilled cheese with provolone, tomato and pesto with a side of pasta salad and “classic soda.”  I got the Faygo Root Beer (a drink that until today I thought was bottled by and for Juggalos) and Rene got a classic ginger ale.  Both were delicious!  The real draw for me, though, is the decor.  between the 40’s music playing in the back ground and “Max Bloom’s Desk” in the corner there is plenty of eye candy to occupy your whole meal.  If you need a cup of joe or a bowl of soup and you don’t mind a taste of hipster then I highly recommend Max Bloom’s Noir Cafe.

See you tomorrow!

1 Comment

Filed under adventures, food, musings, rene

December 25, 2010 · 9:18 am

Christmas Eve… Oh, wait it’s already Christmas!

I’m sitting in our living room watching The History Channel learning about the gospel of Judas.  I’ve already seen most of it, but I’m not tired and can’t sleep.  I wish I could say that I was all jazzed for Christmas morning and that was why I can’t sleep but I feel like I’m too old for that and really my mind is just full of mud, and I feel inspired to write. 

I bought myself a Moleskine journal, the same kind that I got my groomsmen.  They’re supposed to be the same kind of journal that Hemingway used and I like Hemingway and I wanted a fun new book so I got one.  When I was a teenager I used to keep journals all the time.  When I look back at them they are basically diaries with all the embarrassing emotional ramblings that you’d expect to see coming out of a upper-middle class teen, but I never thought of them as diaries I always called them “blank books” and usually  bought new ones when I found one with what I thought was a cool cover.  The first one was bound in burlap and is still my favorite. 

This Moleskine journal is pretty neat.  It’s small, pocket sized, and comes with an elastic strap to hold the book closed.  There’s a ribbon book mark to hold your place and an expanding pocket in the back to hold things that are just a bit bigger than a business card.  The inner cover has a spot to write your address so that it can be returned if lost and, in a wonderfully pretentious turn, a line that says, “Reward if returned: $______”.  I don’t think I’m going to fill in that last line.  All the pomp and circumstance makes it feel like whatever I write in there should be important like notes for a travel journal or government secrets and so I find myself dying to jot in it but not sure what it should be.  Whatever it is I’m confident that I’ll avoid the emotional ramblings of a thirty-something.

Next week starts the editing process for the new sets pf shows that will be featured on Wiggy Webs.  I’ll be posting on the Wiggy Blog and Twitter as those new shows go up – I’m very excited!!

I’m yawning now so I’m going to go to sleep.

Merry Christmas to all!

See you tomorrow!

Leave a Comment

Filed under adventures, business, day in the life, rambling

July 21, 2009 · 5:49 pm

The O.C. Fair

There aren’t many things that are like a county fair. No matter what part of the country you are in the fair is always pretty much the same. There are the scary carnival rides, scary more in their construction than in actual intended thrill, deep fried food ranging from Twinkies to funnel cake to hand dipped anything, and a variety of items on sale that you never really need, but at just that moment you can’t live without. Rene and I went to the Orange County Super Fair last week with our friends Julie and Erik and we did our best to have a “Fair” time.

Get it? That was a pun.

The pictures tell the story, I’ll fill in what might not be obvious.

We actually started out with a few things that did not get photographed, this included roasted corn, a veggie kabob, a fried chicken sandwich on a Krispy Kreme doughnut, a ham and Swiss and bacon sandwich, the Weird Al’s Brain Show and margaritas. The food was delightful, as well as heavy, the drinks were delightful, and Al’s Brain was fun but disappointingly short. We had a lot of fun looking at the factoids placed around the lobby. I found myself wishing that it had been a 4-D presentation and not just 3-D – but it was good. The super star cameos were worth the price of admission alone – however, considering that the price of admission was “free” maybe you actually came away with more than you may have bargained for. On to the pics!


Here’s me standing in front of one of many of the wonderful meat carts at the fair. Yes, they were cooking pork butts.


Erik and I got chocolate covered bacon. It tastes an awful lot like chocolate covered pretzels. The biggest complaint all around is that there is too much chocolate in the chocolate/bacon ratio. I enjoyed it, but wanted more of that wonderful bacon flavor.



Here are pics of Rene and Erik with a giant cow statue, doing what you do with a giant cow statue.

Here’s a pic of Rene in the Future Farmers of America photo display. I took a pic too, but it just won’t upload correctly.


Here Erik is eating a hand dipped corn dog – important when there are so many frozen corn dogs available, you wanna’ make sure you get yours made fresh.


Here are the ladies, Rene & Julie, in front of the “Queen of the Mummies” ride – or whatever it was called. We didn’t go on it, we just took a picture in front of it. Fair rides scare me and are expensive. It remains to be seen if I will go on any this year.


Here’s me eating a TWO FOOT SAUSAGE! It was delicious.


Here are Erik and I just before Erik’s food coma starts to get the better of him.


So, as his coma took hold, we decided to sit in the foot massage chairs – those are SOOOOOOO worth the quarter!


The ladies in front of the sunflowers. Aren’t they lovely?


By now we lost Erik, so the ladies and I did a wine tasting. Good stuff!


Here’s a picture that Erik got for his soon-to-be-born daughter, Lucy. Good choice, sir!



Every year Rene and I get photo booth photos from the fair, we’ve been doing it since we when we dated back in the day. These are thew photos from this year.

We had a lot of fun! There are a few more trips planned for this year and I’ll…

See you tomorrow!

3 Comments

Filed under adventures, fair, friends, musings