blog, blog, blog. i hate not having time to blog, cause then i have to write these really long articles about a billion things - then everyone is all like, "that is long, i'm not reading that." it really bugs me when people don't blog. i like to know what's up, and then i don't do it - stupid.

so yeah. last weekend kari's dad came down for his 50th birthday. the plan was originally to see some sweet aerosmith and cheap trick, but steven tyler apparently turned into a pansy all of a sudden, haha. stupid 60 year old rockers... always getting weak. instead we just did the normal thing, ate lots, made beer, went out, etc. it was a good time though. we toured a dude's insane homebrew setup and learned quite a bit.

during that weekend my domains were in the process of being transferred over to a new DNS. it is nuts how broken joker was and how much it affected my stuff. nick and i scrambled to get everything back online and working correctly. we got a new truespin design done and then were featured in datebook for des moines alive. it was nice. we got about 8,000 hits and 40 reviews the day datebook came out. dma's 1 year anniversary was this weekend also. the site had about 391 locations, 318 photos, 500,000 hits, and around 750 submitted reviews in that year. so now that we're rocking that site, we need another big project to rule more.

this last weekend was gross domestic product, a big show with 14 hot local bands. i would've liked to have seen about 5 more bands there, but whatever it was a really great show - probably the best local show i've been to actually. i saw a couple random bands that i didn't know, plus leap year, the autumn project, the envy corps, and aeon grey. all were great. this should really become a yearly festival.

saturday i played paintball with zach, trent, and some kids up in story city. it was pretty fun. we all had our guns turned up super high so the balls stung a bit, heh. at one point i was 1 of 2 people left on our team and was completely surrounded by 4 peeps so i sprinted across the entire playing field up this hill "saving private ryan" style, haha. somehow i ran 50+ yards with 4 guys shooting at me and didn't get hit once. i was all covering the back of my head as paintballs were whizzing past me - it ruled. later, kari and i met up with some friends and went out again.

sunday was m'hamed and gabe's birthday party. we hung out, shot potatoes, etc. it was a good time. i met a german kid named roman who translated the tool song that's supposed to be a cake recipe. it was pretty funny.

when we left their house the weather got NUTS, it was raining, hailing, tornadoing, etc. we were all driving around looking for tornados. i even had my camera ready. then when we got home our backyard flooded something fierce. the water came up like 22 feet into our yard and was 2 inches shy of flooding my shed. ankeny sucks at drainage, bad. ninja liked it though.

k this is ridiculously long, i'm gonna stop writing. here are pics and pics.