Today is Geoff's birthday.

So here are some very old and slightly embarrassing photos of him that his family found a little while ago.

Mwahahaha.

The Candy Man can. Repeatedly.

Last weekend Katie and I tagged along with some friends on a quick day trip to the beach, where this happened:

But enough about that.

The purpose of the trip was to locate the Greatest Salt Water Taffy Place in the World, which Katie and I had found on a previous trip (if you're wondering, it's right here).

Our friends Megan and Alex were planning a similar expedition and so --- Ocean's 11-like team assembled --- we headed for glory and delicious saltwater goodness.

What is it that makes it the Greatest Salt Water Taffy Place in the World?

I'm glad you asked.

Yes, we've hit triple-digit flavor combinations. 

See that? That's all taffy. 

Sweet delicious taffy.

There is, however, a slight problem with the Greatest Salt Water Taffy Place in the World, and it's the fact that they have a theme song. 

A theme song that plays on a loop every 2 minutes, over and over and over again. 

This theme song, to be specific: 

Now I'm a fan of Sammy as much as the next guy, but that song repeated, every day? I'd go crazy.

But needless to say I now own my own weight in saltwater taffy of every variety.

 And it's not just regular delicious taffy. It's taffy that makes you say "what the WHAT?"

 

And my personal favorite:

Seriously, these guys are like the Bernie Bott's of taffy.

...actually, disregard that last caption. That was awful.

Sorry about that.

I'm going to eat some candy now.

O HAI!

Oh, hey, Internet, it's me. Bruce Campbell.

Geoff and Katie are hanging out being lazy good-for-nothing's today. So I thought I'd upload some of their photos that have been left on their camera. 

If Geoff were here, he'd probably have something witty to say about each of them, but I'm just a cat.

I don't really care that much about pithiness.

 

  

According to Geoff this is a guy named Mac Carruth. He's a goalie for the Portland Winterhawks hockey team, who are in the playoffs or something. Geoff went to Winterhawks practice a few weeks ago and hung out with the players for a story he wrote. There were some TV news people there, too, who had a quick interview with Carruth about the playoffs as he was on his way out the door.  Geoff snapped a quick pic.

Katie and Geoff spent some time with little baby Max a few weeks ago, and Katie (as usual) took a billion photos. This was my favorite, so I put it up. Geoff and Katie had others they liked but, you know, they're good-for-nothings so it was up to the ol' BC to pick the photos.

This week Geoff wrote a story about a Chinese food restaurant that's closing after almost 60 years in business. The woman on the left is one of the owners, and daughter of the restaurant's founder. The woman on the right is Greta Helmer, a waitress at the restaurant who has worked there for 46 years. 

They looked over some old newspaper clippings about the restaurant and talked about the good ol' days, including a fire that burned the restaurant to the ground in the '60s.

This is a fish. Geoff brought him home the other day. I want him. Oooooh how I want him.

Geoff calls him Robert, or something. But I call him Dinner.

Geoff sprays me with a water bottle when I try to eat him, but Geoff goes back to work tomorrow.

He will be mine, oh yes, he will be mine.

10/52 On pencilfish, mollies and pearl gouramis

 

 In case you couldn't tell by the picture, we bought a fish tank.

There's something about fish that I find incredibly calming.

Fish tanks and Pursingers just sort of go together. Growing up, having a fish tank (or two) were as common in a room as a TV (in fact, I had a fish tank in my room loooong before I ever had my own television.)

As such I have an impressive amount of information about zebra danios, neon tetras and tiger barbs swimming around in my brain.

(20 points if you recognized any of those names without clicking the links.)

I haven't had any fish since Katie and I got married, until a few months ago.

For Christmas this year my sister bought me a fish tank for my office. It was tiny, only a few gallons, but it was the perfect size for work.

It even had a little castle!

The small little fish I had were a nice quiet edition to my crazy workplace. Fish don't have problems, they don't have bad days. They just swim, and enjoy themselves, and thank you when you pour a few flakes in the bowl.

But when I came to work last week they did had a problem. A fairly major one:

All the water had drained from their fish tank.

Cleaning crews had discovered over the weekend that my tank had a leak in it, and that water was pouring all over my desk. We managed to save the fish before the entire tank was dry, and I carried them home on my lap in a bucket with no place to put them.

But after a quick conversation with The Misses we were off to buy a new tank.

And voilà:

But we had a problem. I had myself a big-boy 10 gallon aquarium. But I still had my teeny-tiny little castle and teeny-tiny little fish.

There was only one thing to do. 

TO THE FISH STORE!!!

Now our tank is home to a smattering of little swimmers.

    There's B.A. Baracus

 Cory Feldman        

    Bert

 Ernie

The Fantastic Four (yes, there are only three here)

And, my personal favorite...

Bobby Brown.

They seem pretty happy. Their tank is bigger, cleaner and not leaking. All are improvements over their previous home, and their new roommates seem to be adjusting. 

B.A. has taken the "Katie's favorite fish" award. Impressive, considering she doesn't like fish and wasn't too crazy when I said "oh hey, honey, want to go run an errand with me?"

BAM! Fish store.

My work...

...is one of those places that everyone is happy at, and everybody likes to know everyone, and a place where they value their employees. That's all fine and well but in some ways it's nice to be anonymous. In the first week do you know how many times I heard "wow, you look so much like your sister, Jenny!"

I knew that on the first day I was going to get my picture taken, so I took a little extra time getting ready and put a little more effort into it then normal but what I didn't know (even though my sister works there and could have warned me) is that said picture would be sent out to all the employees so that when they saw me around the office they knew who I was and was able to welcome me to the company.

Employee pictures also get put up on the companies intranet so that if someone mentions an employee  you don't know, you can say "wait, let me look them up!"

It's really helpful, but as someone who prefers to be behind the camera and not in front of it I was not pleased that it would get passed around and forever live on the interwebs... but it's already there and I can't change it now, so oh well. Here you go.

To catch you all up on the rest of my work situation: I love it.

My work? It's not exciting. It's just data entry but I love pretty much everything about my company. I work with lots of nice people, I see my sis a little more (kinda), we all play volleyball together on our lunch break and can do yoga, and they give me lots of free stuff and pay me pretty well :)

Also, I got to go shopping with my companies money for a new chair that I wanted and a keyboard tray :)

Shopping when I don't have to pay for it? Turns out it's really, really fun.

On a more serious note: I'm starting to hit my groove there and fall into place with everyone. Yay!

9/52 "Paper or Plastic?"

See, here's the thing. This is our ninth photo in our 52 Weeks project.

But if we had taken a photo a week like we were supposed to, we'd be on photo #14.

...Actually, that's not nearly as bad as I was expecting.

Good for us!

Today was a boring "get stuff done" kind of day. We cleaned house, we did the laundry,

we went to the store...

Our blog: the home of really exciting stuff.

What could next week's picture hold? Perhaps we'll do something crazy, like watch paint dry or make a sandwich.

Find out on the next exciting episode of....

Just call me Roy Scheider

Geoff? Outside? Doing things? I know. I'm not comfortable with this either.

Last Friday I got a call from my brother Branden wondering what I had planned for that Sunday.

"Nuthin,'" I said. "Except for a big date with Little Big Planet my schedule is wide open."

"Oh good," he said. "Then you can go fishing with Dad and me."

"By jove," I cried. "That sounds splendiferous!"

(Geoff's note: I don't actually remember what was said, and some aspects of this conversation may have been enhanced for dramatic effect).

(Geoff's note 2: I have never been fishing before. Ever.)

The Columbia River, for those who haven't been, is an interesting place. It's packed with fellow boaters and fishermen, as well as gigantic cargo ships from all over the world.

This is CNN.

And so, on a bitingly cold morning last Sunday, the three of us set out in a small boat on the hunt for the elusive beast known as: The Salmon.

"This salmon, swallow you whole."

"Sometimes that salmon he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And, you know, the thing about a salmon... he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be living... until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'..."

It was bitingly cold, and it poured for almost the entire nine hour excursion.

And to make matters worse, there weren't even any fish and hardly any bites.

UNTIL....

"♫ ba dum... ba dum... ♫"

"Two barrels, and he's going down again!"

We fought for hours, he and I, in a test of will between two masters of their element. Neither willing to give up an inch in their struggle for dominance about a minute and a half. This was the first fish I had ever caught, and I had no idea what I was doing. But in the end, the winner prevailed.

"Smile you son of a..."

Fishing in the cold and the rain wasn't really my thing, but it's hard to deny the results: He was the only fish the three of us were able to catch, and he was all mine.

And he was tasty.

Very, extremely, super-dee-dooper tasty.