Halloween is prolly my favorite holiday – everybody dresses up, decorates their house, and eats candy. San Francisco loves halloween almost as much as burningman – if you’ve ever been to the castro for halloween you’d know what i mean – its like mardi gras in New Orleans but EVERYBODY is dressed up. 
Normally i don’t do much decorating, and i think i’ve only carved like 5 pumpkins in my life, but this year i made my best jack-o-latern ever. My friend steph had people over for dinner and pumpkin carving a week ago, and she bought these carving kits. At first i was like .. lame (i don’t need any help with MY carving! heh) .. but then i flipped thru the book that came with it and saw really cool designs, so i decided to make the wolf. It took me almost 2 hours, but i was going slow and chillin’ with my friends, but it was definitely worth it. You impressed? As a side note, the pumpkin only lasted about 4 days before the mold started going crazy. At least we got pictures. Thanks Steph!!
I love San Francisco, i really do, especially the haight where I live. But i do miss these things called “seasons” that the rest of the country gets to enjoy. A couple weeks ago i finally made it up to visit my friend suzi in seattle, washington, where autumn is just beginning. We both wanted to go hiking/camping, and planned a trip to centail washington – Lake Chelan. It was awesome. 
It’s about 3-4 hours east of seattle on the dry, other half of washington state. Due to fear of rain, we stayed at a hotel in the town on the southern tip of Lake Chelan. The lake is 55 miles long, and about 2 miles wide – and to get to the northern tip you must take a ferry – no roads. We missed the ferry, and hiked a nice 7-8 mile roundtrip to Pot Peak (google maps). That was perfect. We also did some wine tasting (pretty good wine, and really friendly wine pourers) and had a nice dinner. On the drive back we stopped in this town called leavenworth, WA, which was made to look entirely like a bavarian village. You totally felt like you were in germany – even the starbucks had their sign in a special bavarian font. We only stayed a couple hours and then headed back to seattle, but right when we left we past the most beautiful spot on the side of the road (Hwy 2). Now thats the seasons i’m talking about.
I did get to see a bit of seattle – suzi’s neighborhood, including the Fremont Troll. The troll is basically a carving under the fremont bridge – check out the link for a dope picture. We drove around, she pointed out where dave mathews hangs out, saw her office, the seattle space needle, blah blah blah. But I especially love this lake by her house – green lake. She showed it to me in the evening right after it rained and we got to see the most amazingly beautiful rainbow. In fact, it sprung right out of my head. My mom always told me i was worth more than a pot of gold.
Right before i went to morocco i lost my cell phone, which sux. I quickly scoped out the current offerings, almost went with Motorola RAZR v3, but decided on the VX-8100 from LG. I’m not a big fan of verizon (not as good as ATT/Cingular at yahoo campus), but verizon’s the only one selling it. The 2 main reasons i went with the 8100 were because i previously had the VX6000 from LG, and it ruled (robust – dropped it hundreds of times, and could hack it with custom ringtones, etc using bitpim) and the among the new features of the 8100 was a mp3 player, which gave it lots of potential. At the time i bought it, the mp3 player was disabled, but the hackers were organized around this phone and it wouldn’t be disabled for long. Recently verizon released version 4 of their firmware which enabled the mp3 player. I also ordered a bunch of accessories online, and now i am good to go. Feel free to see my details on the VX8100