Six Saltines

Have you ever tried the Saltine challenge? You have to eat six Saltines in a minute — which is impossible (challengers soon realize this after the first one sucks all the saliva out of their mouth).

Quinn had never tried the challenge before, so decided to give it a shot tonight. None of us succeeded, but Aspen managed to eat 10 Saltines in a minute. I don't think the challenge applies to dogs...

American River

Tyler and I had an urge to get off the hill on Sunday, so we drove down to Auburn to go for a hike. We decided to hike along the American River so Aspen could go for a swim. Moses was a wuss and only swam for a little bit. The trail went past some old man-made tunnels and through abandoned rock quarries. The area was close to Sutters Mill — the site where gold was first discovered, and thus started the California Gold Rush.

After the hike, we went and ate at Monkey Cat — a bistro in Auburn. The waitress was very impressed at the amount of food we feasted on after our eight mile hike.

Love the booties

It snowed here last night, so we all thought we'd take advantage of the powder day (which might be the last one of the season). We decided to do some "out of bounds" snowboarding with the dogs. One driver would drop the dogs and the snowboarders at the top of the hill, and then meet them at the bottom to shuttle them all back to the top again. Since the dogs were going to be running in the snow for a prolonged amount of time, we decided to put their booties on. This is what happened:

And I caved...

I feel a need to explain the reason I finally caved to Facebook and Twitter since I've been holding out for about five years (just two for Twitter).

I cover the business beat at the paper, and many of the business owners I talked to have started using social networking sites to promote their business — especially since they don't have many advertising dollars.

Since I like to cover all my bases, I thought it would be irresponsible of me not to set up social networking pages of my own, then and check out what South Shore businesses were doing. From a preliminary investigation, it appears that Twitter is great if you want to find people heading to town, and to provide recommendations for them. One of the casino reps I talked said she's followed up with a handful of people who she contacted on Twitter and found they sought her advice. Facebook is great to build a network of fans, and appeals to an older, educated demographic. MySpace is good for younger people, who might not have gone to college, and also has lots of pages for gangs, bars, clubs and musicians (for the record, I did not get a MySpace account. I just used Jensen's login).

All in all, it should be an interseting article when it comes out — probably in Saturday's edition.

Goodbye...

...Seattle P.I.

Daylight savings

The Bemis visit

Tyler, me and Eric at Kirkwood on Sunday.

Eric Bemis came to visit this weekend. We had to bribe him with Les Claypool tickets to get him down here. After losing $100 on penny slots on Friday, he stayed clear of the casinos for the most part.

Even though we used to have Funday Mondays, we had a Funday Sunday instead. Tyler had the day off, so we went out to Kirkwood. Then we went to a Les Claypool tailgate party on the sixth floor of the MontBleu Casino parking garage. Some of my coworkers met us up there and we grilled and ate fish tacos. We then headed to the concert where Saul Williams and the Yard Dogs Road Show both opened, and then Les Claypool took the stage. It was an awesome show and I recommend you go see it if you get the chance.

Here's some parting shots of our time at Kirkwood:

Lounging on the couch