Raving Amicks

Here is a look at the before and after changes made on the gift card holder for Western AS bookstore. The objective was to make the gift card holder identify more clearly with Western Washington University.

Spent 5 days and 4 nites fly fishing and camping on the Deschutes River in central Oregon. Great food and comaraderie with 5 of my fishing friends.  The fish are rainbow trout and they are all wild.  Released all the fish.  Got rained on and hailed on.  Check out my river rock totems!

Wild lilacs in bloom in Hood River. Come in a variety of colors from white to blue and many shades in between.

Thanks for the awesome birthday flowers, Amick Parents!

Tyler and I have been idly playing with the new camera, but there are so many crazy settings and we haven’t had a chance to take it outside of the apartment for a real test-run yet. Here’s a shot I took this morning of the flowers, though. Since it’s super gray and overcast outside, this was taken in horrendous indoor “lighting” and the only edits were a simple crop. Came out pretty sharp and amazing considering the conditions!

Well, even though it’s been over a month—and even though I posted these pictures almost as long ago—I thought I should write about Tyler’s and my trip to Chicago. We went the last weekend of April to visit our friend who was there for law school. Incidentally, he already graduated and returned to Seattle just last weekend.

My highlight of the trip was definitely the turtle racing at Big Joe’s. We went with our friend, his fiancée, another friend who traveled with us, and some other random people from Chicago. Basically, the turtle racing is a lottery; for every drink you order, you get a number of raffle tickets based on what you ordered (and the bartender’s whims). The more you drink, the better chance you have of being drawn. If your raffle ticket is drawn, then you go up to a table and randomly pull out a ball with a number. That number corresponds to one of the six numbers taped on the racing turtles’ backs, which means the turtle with that number is “your” turtle for the race. The person with a winning turtle gets a free T-shirt, and the person with a losing turtle gets a free beer.

Despite having ordered an obscene number of pitchers of beer, none of our tickets were called. Oh well, I did muscle my way up and take lots of pictures of the scared turtles.

Meanwhile, Tyler’s favorite part of Chicago was definitely all the brownstone and brick buildings. He can write all about that if he wants, though.

Oh yeah, and we did other things like seeing two pairs of mating tortoises at the free public zoo, having drinks at the top of the Hancock tower, and getting alternately pummeled by rain and wind.