A one-win dynasty with the Janitorial Honeybees
So we have found some new friends. 
New friends who not only throw amazing parties, but friends who also do other awesome stuff.
Awesome stuff like playing softball for teams that are named The Janitorial Honeybees.
Well, this past week our new friends had us join the team for their last game. The last game that would decide whether or not they would end the season as complete losers, or if they would finish with one final and only win of the season.
Stephanie and I joined up forces with the Honeybees for this final battle and helped them fight through 5 demanding innings that were filled with drama, action, heroics and letdowns.
After the dust cleared, the impossible had happened. The Janitorial Honeybees had came out on top for the first time all season. It wasn’t an easy win, but it was a team win and a win that will never be forgotten by me, Stephanie, the rest of the Honeybees and of course the random homeless guy who was drinking a Budweiser on the sidelines.
Yep, the Janitorial Honeybees ended the season with a solid 1-11 record and if you ask me, that’s a solid foundation for a future.
I can’t wait until next season - the dynasty begins.
Swarm honeybees! Bzzzzzzzzzzzz…
Teacher Stephanie graduates her class of 2008
Last weekend, Stephanie officially graduated her first class of California preschoolers here in Palo Alto. It was my first time seeing her school, meeting her fellow teachers and of course seeing all of the crazy kids that she deals with every day of the week.
Let me simply say that I have a whole new respect for her and for what she does each day while teaching at that preschool. The kids are awesome and hilarious, but it takes a special type of person to teach them every single day. Isn’t she awesome?
Of course I couldn’t miss out on getting some video of the sweet graduation action. Check out the video below or over here on YouTube when you get a chance and be sure to leave a comment and tell Stephanie congratulations!
A San Francisco reunion with Rev Peyton and his Big Damn Band
It’s kind of funny how as life goes on and as you get exposed to more and more exciting things your tolerance for this excitement seems to go up just the same way that your tolerance for cheep beer goes up in college. If you have been following this blog for it’s seemingly short-lived life, Steph and I have done some things that have just blown us both away. Things that afterwards we say to ourselves, “Damn, this might be hard to top…”. Well, somehow, someway we always seem to top whatever it was and end up with some amazing footage/pics/stories to prove it.
But, getting back to what I was first saying, even though we keep on trumping one amazing experience after another, the bar of awesomeness that is required to get us both super excited about doing something keeps on rising even higher and higher. So, it has been our mission to keep on finding these things that seem to always give us those little butterflies that pop up in your stomach when you are about to do something that you are truly excited for.
Lucky for us, the butterflies are basically built into the adventure that we’re taking on tonight. I mean, we’re going to see the Rev in San Francisco, California and when I say the Rev, I mean The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band. The same Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band that is from our home of Indianapolis, IN. The same Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band that makes people go insane(and sometimes naked) at their shows. The same Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band that has been traveling all over the freakin’ place in a van spreading some Big Damn Love. The same Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band that features Breezy, a crazed, washboard-shredding, facial-expression-rocking woman(who also happens to be the Rev’s lovely wife). Oh and yes, the same Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band that is led by the one and only Rev Peyton, whose guitar playing and screaming is second only to his brother, Jayme, who keeps the Rev on beat with a barrage of some ridiculously fast-paced drumming.
Did I mention how excited that Steph and I are for this show?
Anyways, here are the details on the show, if you happen to read this blog before the show tonight shoot me an email at ryan.hupfer@gmail.com and we’ll get crazy at the show together.
Where: 12 Galaxies in south San Francisco
When: Doors open at 8pm with Ha-Ha Tonka opening up at 9pm and the Rev following, probably around 10pm
How Much: Tickets are $10 online, but we’ll probably buy ours the old fashioned way - at the door when we get there.
One more thing - here is a video that I wanted to dig out of the archives for everyone to see. It’s when the Rev and crew were selling all of their stuff so that they could hit the road for good. Man, I can’t wait to see these guys.
Back Home Again in Indiana!
Yep, we took a little vacay to spend some time at home with our friends and family. My awesome roommate from college, Holly, is getting married this coming Saturday and Ryan’s 10 year High School reunion just happened to fall a week before, so we figured we had a pretty good excuse to come back to good ol’ Indy for a bit. I can’t tell you how weird it felt to fly into the Indianapolis airport and think to myself, “I’m on vacation… in Indiana” haha. What a vacation it has been though; it’s only Tuesday and we’ve had enough fun to last us for the whole week already!
Shortly after arriving we headed up to P-Town for Ryan’s high school reunion. Wow.. really is all I can say. I didn’t know that Donnie’s( a little photo for your pleasure) could hold that many crazy Pendleton Arabians at one time! You know it’s a good reunion when you didn’t even go to the high school that the reunion was celebrating and you still had the time of your life. That’s all I have to say about that
Last night we attended our first Mojo Monday Night at the Spot since we left for CA two months ago. It was an awesome night, and we stayed out on the deck for most of it just soaking up the fabulous Indiana summer night. It’s comforting to come home and be with your old friends again. It really makes you step back and reminisce a little about the fun times of the past, and know that you always have an incredible support group of friends at home. It’s funny how I don’t really feel homesick at all when we’re actually in California, but coming home kind of brings some of those feelings to the surface a little when you re-live your previous way of life for a bit. It’s true that you have to move away to truly come to an appreciation of your home where you grew up. I know that I’ve viewed Indiana a little differently this time around. It’s our home and it will always be here, we’ll always love it, but there’s so much left to experience and explore.
Now it’s time to go and live up the rest of our week here! More to come on our crazy Hoosier adventures
The evidence of the Bay to Breakers madness
As Stephanie and I have continued our California journey together there have been many things happen along the way that I would call ‘crazy’ or ‘wild’ or even going as far as ‘pretty nuts’. However, there hasn’t been anything that has even come close to the madness that was the Bay to Breakers race in San Francisco that we joined in on a couple of weekends ago.
We saw crazy people, we saw people doing crazy things and of course, we saw naked people. The race was 12Ks of pure insanity and for some unknown reason I waited until now to create and post the masterpiece of a video that you can watch below or over here on YouTube.
Let me know what you think about the crazy day that we had in San Francisco and be sure to enter in your email in the subscription box that’s located at the top of the column to the right. It’s the best way to keep up with what we’re doing out here in California - you know you want to keep up with us!
Celebrating Cinco de Mayo at AOL?
Beer, chess, beer pong and hanging out at the AOL building. Just another day in Palo Alto I guess. Me, Stephanie and some of my newest homies and co-workers headed over to the AOL building tonight to celebrate Cinco de Mayo with some chess and some cerveza (that’s beer for all of you non-Spanish speaking folks). Here are some pics that thought deserved some time to shine in this bloggy-blog. Be sure to click the Crank Buttons in the bottom right and of the pics to see what I added to each one. Believe me, each one has a story of it’s own.
Also, be sure to check out the video that I created for the event at the bottom of the post or over here on YouTube.
Kevin Rose from Digg tried to steal my girlfriend.
Stephanie just posted about the Diggnation party that we headed out to last night at a night club in San Francisco. It was Stephanie’s first time venturing up to ‘the city’ and it was definitely an eye-opener for me as far as the level of diversity that a city such as San Francisco has - especially when compared to our last experiences with Indianapolis. Stephanie wrote an awesome post about how the night went, so I’m just going to post a few things that you all should be aware of and that I noticed throughout the night:
- Kevin Rose got me in a headlock and tried to steal my girlfriend. Ok, well he did get me in a headlock (see pics below)
- When we walked into the club, people were literally cheering while Kevin and Alex played Halo 3 on the big screens
- Mighty, the night club that hosted the event, is supposedly one of best new clubs in the nation, plays mostly techno and just hosted a party that was full of computer geeks like myself. Amazing.
- The place was crazy packed with people. Some who flew/drove pretty damn far just for this event.
- Stephanie’s step mom, Shannon is a dancing machine.
- Kevin and Alex literally took pictures with fans for about an hour straight
Here are a couple of the pics of the night - be sure to click the CRANK IT button in the bottom right-hand corner of the pic to view/add some Cranks!
I “Digg” Nerds!
One of my favorite parts about moving is experiencing all of the fun and exciting events and happenings of a new city. Lucky for us we are only a short 20 minute drive away from one of the coolest cities I have ever been to, San Francisco. It’s truly an incredible city and the options are endless for fun things to do.
Tonight we had the opportunity to go to one of the top-rated night clubs in the United States, Mighty in San Francisco. Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht of diggnation.com hosted their live tech/web culture show at the club and wow was it an experience.
As you can imagine the show brought quite the crowd of nerds out to see the two digg guys talk all about techie stuff that I personally don’t understand a word of. Of course, Ryan and Abdo had a blast and felt right at home!
After the show was over we had a chance to meet both Kevin and Alex ( see above photo where they obviously wanted to leave Ryan out of the picture ) and then later show off some of our sweet dance moves!! I can’t wait to go to more of these awesome events and meet more and more incredible people in this great city. Have I mentioned recently how much I love California?? Well… I do… A LOT!! It keeps getting better and better!
Nerds Gone Wild! Photobucket party in San Fran
Last night me and my man Jeff headed up to the ‘big city’, aka San Francisco, to chat with a big time radio station about utilizing the awesomeness of PhotoCrank for their online properties. The meeting went awesome (another post here soon) and needless to say they were really diggin’ what we have going on with the product - which gives me a great feeling going forward. The opportunity is amazing out here in Palo Alto and it seems like with each day more and more doors are opened to me. It’s incredible, really.
After the awesome meeting Jeff and I decided that we needed to celebrate by heading over to an invite-only party that was thrown by the guys over at Photobucket (Wikipedia entry). This entire week San Fran is hosting the Web 2.0 Expo, so almost every cool, hip and rad Internet outfit are throwing parties to celebrate. Photobucket definitely has the means to throw a sweet bash (open bar, food, the works) considering that they were bought by FOX for $250 million about a year ago.
The party was an amazing time and I had the chance to meet some AMAZING people including the 8th guy to work at Napster, the 3rd guy at Photobucket and Jeff even met the guy who created AOL Instant Messenger. God bless that man, I think that me and all of my friends owe him a high five for what he’s given our generation. Like I said, awesome people…now I just need to get in touch with all of them.
Here are a few photos from the bash - click the Crank button in the bottom right-hand corner of each pic for my thoughts on each one and feel free to get your Crank on, too.
Cali Road Trip: Packing and saying goodbye
Steph and I were almost ready to hit the road, but first we had to pack up and say goodbye to our homies. Ever try to pack your life into one car? Good times.
Stay updated each day, we are attempting to do one of these during the entire trip….attempting.