COAS Ski Trip

    Well, we had our annual COAS Ski Trip to Sunriver, OR this past weekend.  Pam, Topher, Alicia, Susan, Miller, Danny, Tiffany, Chris, Aaron, Brendan, Karen, Robyn, Anna, Eleanor, Chris, Logan, Drew, Brycen, and Abby.  We all drove up Thursday

night so we could go skiing at Bachelor on Friday for free after donating 3 cans of food.  The house that Pam found for us was amazing.  It was two stories with a garage, pong tabe, hot tub, fireplace and a tv with dvd player in every bedroom.  The whole place for 3 nights including beer money and dinner on friday and saturday was only 60 bucks a person.
    The first night was of course a night of debauchery where Chris woke up with
writing on his face and I woke up on the wooden floor holding the pen.  The pictures in the morning were proof to all who couldn't remember how wild of a night it was. 
    Friday was a great day of skiing.  In the morning I hung out with Anna, Brendan, Drew, Logan, and Karen giving pointers and helping people get down the hill safely.  Anna turned out to be a terrific skier and Brendan was picking up mad skills as well.  In the afternoon I caught up with Hartz and the two of us made several descents from the summit ridge over a small cornice into a bowl of nearly sheer ice carving huge banking turns the whole way lovin' it.  On our traverse to get to the ridge we went by several snowboarders who were being rescued off a face by ski patrol that was too icey to even catch an edge on.  Fall there and we would have tumbled pass them over a cliff band. 

    After slayin' the summit we decided to grab some food and then hit the park for the rest
of the afternoon which was amazing.  The halfpipe was
terrific and I was
starting to get the feeling back of riding it after having not done so for several years.  The terrain park jumps were also the biggest I have hit in a few years and I was glad that I still felt completely comfortable going off the biggest ones on the mountain. 
    When we all got back to the house friday night we thought it would be a quiet night of rest.... nope... Flip-Cup turned the night into debauchery
again resulting in can-crushing with bike helmets, a midnight bike ride that resulted
in tire tracks over my shirt, ripped pajama's, Anna getting thrown into the pool by an anihilated Chris, more wrestling, and 5 cases of beer getting tanked.  We had pasta that night which was terrific as well which I'm sure helped to absorb the booze being put into our systems. 
    Saturday, after sleeping in, we all decided to go sledding. It ended up taking us about an hour to finally find a sledding hill decent enough but the one we found was well worth the wait.  It was pretty steep but very icey with bumps
at the bottom that took everyone out - especially Eleanor who really took a brutal punishing.  Aaron and I decided to build a ski jump next to the sledding hill and proceeded to slay it over and
over again while Anna took pictures and snowmobilers watched in the distance.  On our way out of the sledding area we found an igloo and took some pictures of everyone in front of it. 
    Back at the house we had bowl after bowl of homemade chili and watched Old School which was a first showing for Brendan believe it or not.  Once again everyone appeared bruised and exhausted but next thing you know.... debauchery off of cheap champagne and bottles of wine.  I had planned to
play Hot Bottle (if you care to know email me) with Chris but he
found out the trick and bowed out.  Crazy times in the hot tub and a pre-1998 hip-hop and R&B dance party mix courtesy Old-School-Ellinger kept the party going.  At the end of the night
people were piled on top of each other in beds and all the food and alcohol in the house was gone, save a quarter bottle of rum that must have been hidden. 
    Sunday we cleaned up and I drove Robyn, Chris, and Brendan home, stopping at DQ in Sweethome on the way. It was a great weekend and I had a lot of fun with my closest friends here.  It was definitely needed after the really terrible week I had last week.  Hopefully things will start to go better for me from this point on.

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The time has come

The time has come for a true test of the friendships I have made over the years. 
The time has come for me to tell the world that I have a daughter for whom I love with all my heart.  Her name is Elisse Claire and she was born on October 24th, 2006.  That single event has changed me as a person, changed my life, and made me a better person in the process.  Those close to me, my best friends, and family have known for a while and have been very supportive and caring.  Now the time has come to let everyone know and see who my true friends are. 
   
I am not going to go into a lot of depth about details.  What I will say is that my daughter is being raised in a wonderful, loving, caring environment and her mother
has the full support of her local church, community and fantastic, caring friends.  Ellie and her mom both live in a wondeful apartment in a very afluent community.  I could not have asked for a better environment for my daughter to be raised in.  I had to make a very hard choice in moving to Oregon to go for my PhD as it will keep me from seeing her grow up as I would like, but financially this was the best option I had. 

I hope that my friends will act responsibly with this information and not conjure up
nasty rumors or think differently of me.  I'm still the same guy that all of you have known but now I have bigger responsibilities in life and more motivation to succeed.  I'm sure there are a few of my friends out there who can't wait to pick up the phone and call
everyone with the gossip but when they do I hope they do it responsibly, keeping my feelings in mind.  Life has not been easy for me lately and I've been going through a lot of hard times so keep in mind that rumors and gossip will not help my situation, and it would prove the kind of friend you are to me.  If you have questions or just want to see how I'm doing I welcome the call from my friends.  518-935-3275.  I am going to be very open from now on. 

I have managed to establish a circle of close friends from around the country that love and care about my well being and I also have a girlfriend who loves me dearly and cares about me as I care about her.  One of my biggest fears was telling her because I thought she would run away from me but she has proven to be there for me and I love her for it. 

I can already tell that I have changed significantly for the better as a human being as
a result of becoming a father.  I have grown up a lot this fall.  I've realized that things happen for a reason although sometimes we often don't know what that reason is.  I am more determined than ever now to succeed here in getting my PhD so that I can move on with my career and support my daughter as she grows up.  All the work I do here, all the stress, the 15 hour days, the 2nd job, everything, is so that I can be successful and take care of my daughter financially as a responsible father.   She will always know that her father cares about her and thinks about her all the time.  That is something I will make sure of.  If she ever needs me I will be there for her and I will make sure that she always feels loved.

There... that's about it... now let the text message, emails, and voicemails fly.  But keep in mind that the best information you can get is directly from the source.   If you feel yourself jumping to conclusions or starting to form opinions feel free to inquire directly from me.   Jellinger@gmail.com

What I need the most now from my friends and family is caring support, encouragement and understanding.  Without those I'm not sure if I'll make it over the enormous hurdles that lay ahead of me.

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Aaaaand... I'm fired.

Well, just whe I thought I would be able to support myself here I'm fired.  Apparently he needs someone that can work more hours with years and years of bartending experience.  Would have been nice if he had given me a little more time to settle in and learn the very complicated cocktails they serve there.  Well back to square one and being broke...

The punches I'm trying to roll with in life are beginning to hurt and take their toll on me.

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Bowling, Jonny Cash, A Drag Party, and Sommes' Party Pit

Last night after work ( I love working at Intaba’s so far
although I still have a lot of fancy cocktails to memorize there) I headed over
to Highland Bowl to meet up with Brendan, Brie, Miller, Matt, Sam, Pam, etc for
some late night bowling. I finished 2^nd
in the game I played behind Brie who is apparently a bowling shark! They all got a kick out of my stupid bowling
technique of walking up to the lane and tossing the ball down it… haha.. at
least it worked!

At 11:30 after bowling I headed over to Bombs to meet up
with Julie, Lindsay, Katie, Suzie and Jen for a Jonny Cash cover band that was
pretty good. I saw Hillary the waitress
there and mentioned to her that I knew her friend Emily from work at Intaba’s
which surprised her. Hillary is a
waitress at Bombs who is dating the lead singer of Stairway Denied – The local
Zepplin cover band. It was a good show
and I ended up dancing there with Brendan, Brie, and the girls from the ski
trip until about 1am when I took Katie and Julie back to Julie’s place which
Ironically is directly behind my house on 26^th street instead of 25^th
where I live… weird. Julie’s knee was
still messed up from our dance party at the ski trip so I actually had to carry
her to my truck for the ride home! Haha. 

After dropping them off I was off to meet up with Anna and
Eleanor at Jan Baur’s (my lab co-worker) birthday party at his house. As I walked in I ran into a girl just wearing
a bra with half a boob falling out, and my buddy Aaron Hartz in a full dress
handing me a beer… what!!?... apparently everyone had gotten so drunk that they
decided to exchange clothes or something. Apparently I had missed a wild party with a lot of boobs being shown and
wild drunkenness. I wished Jan a happy
birthday, told Aaron to pull up his stockings and took off with Anna, Eleanor
and Logan to Chris Sommes for a few more beers before heading home at
2:30am!!! I only had to be up in 2.5
hours for CMRU training in the morning….. maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to
stay out so late!

CMRU Winter Travel & Rescue

Well, yesterday I was able to go on my first CMRU (Corvallis Mountain Rescue Unit) training day.  Jason, Nate, I and a few others drove up to Santiam Pass on route 20 to meet up with Bob who would be our resident instructor.  Before I go on let me say a few things about Bob:
    Bob has won National Ski Patroller of the Year more times than anyone.  He has been doing mountain rescue for the past 20+ years and it the most knowledgeable person I've ever met about any travel/rescue/survival in the mountains.  I would happily trust my life to him in any situation and I feel privelaged that I am going to learn high mountain rescue from him over the next 5 to 6 years.
    It was a relaxing day of learning how to use our GPS to locate waypoints in the woods.  It was my first time snowshoeing in the pass and I thought it was truly beautiful.  There was 6+ feet of snow on the ground and no brush like in the East Coast bushwacking.  When we found our final locatioin to meet up we dug a snow shelter and Bob showed us how to analyze the snow for avalanche danger.  We then wrapped Bob in a sled and pulled him back to the car in a mock rescue situation.   
    Overall I learned a great deal and we were only in the woods for about 5-6 hours.  I can't wait until the next saturday of training next month.  Hopefully someday I'll be as knowledgeable as Bob and can teach others as well as he does.

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Mac's Birthday Bash down Monroe Street bars

Well, last night was Mac Barr’s birthday bash down bars on Monroe Street. I had work I had to get done before joining
the crew at 10:30. Everyone was pretty
lit by the time I joined them at
McMenamins, especially Anna who walked into
the Pita Pit yelling Dirty Sanchez at the top of her lungs. Pretty damn funny to see. We all ended the night at Tailgaters where they
were serving dollar PBR’s. Those things
go down like water! We all had a fun
time dancing there even though
we were surrounded by undergraduates. I ended up talking to a few girls at the bar
waiting for a drink and Anna came up to me yelling for me to stop talking to
sluts and that I had a girlfriend. Haha. She’s so protective, and I
wouldn’t cheat on Emily anyway. I bugged
out around 12:30pm to go home and get some sleep while the others continued on
to Chris Sommes for some more drinking as usual – I don’t know how that kid
does it! Happy birthday buddy!

Alcohol Awareness and New Job

Well, in Oregon you
apparently have to take an alcohol training class before you can serve in this
state so I was lucky enough to get signed up for the only one offered in Corvallis for a month
today. I also had an interview at a
restaurant named Intaba’s but soon to be named Wildfire.

The class this morning was from 10am until 2:30pm and it was
really boring. I learned all the regular laws for serving and of course when
not to serve minors. Oregon has a lot of strange laws that don’t
apply many other places. For instance, I
can serve minors O’Doul’s in this state. Although it says alcoholic it does have 2.5% alcohol but because it’s
under the states minimum of 3% I can serve it unlike in NY. The meeting was the Salbasgeon Inn so we all
ordered lunch while there. (Salbasgeon =
Salmon, Bass, Sturgeon).

At 3:30 I went for my interview at Wildfire which I
nailed. Not only was the owner’s name
Ocean (I’m studying Oceanography) but he and his wife Intaba had also lived and
worked in Saratoga Springs, NY for several years. What a coincidence is that!!? We hit it off great and he basically
explained that I would be in charge of the bar and
from what I could tell it
seems like I would have a lot of freedom to change it, improve it, and work it
how I like as long as I meet his rules and expectations obviously. 2 hours after I got home he called me back to
say I got the job!!!! Yeah!!! I can’t
believe I landed a job as a manager of a brand new bar (the bar was just added
to the restaurant) at one of the nicest places in town. On the weekends they plan to have live jazz
play and in the summer there is beautiful patio seating next to the clay
oven. If you care to check it out the
website is HERE.

Ski Trip #1

This weekend I went on my first ski trip in Oregon to Mt. Bachelor.  We got a house in SunRiver, a local community about 20 minutes drive from the mountain.  The log cabin was beautiful!  It had a
stove, kitchen, upstairs with beds, hot tub outside, and a river running through the backyard.  14 people went on the trip for the two nights and we
each paid 50 bucks.  That money paid for the two nights at the house and food for chili on Friday night and sphagetti on Saturday night.  I just received an email after getting home saying that we would all get $20 back as well because we paid too much!  Can you believe that, $30 dollars bought me two nights at a ski chateau with a hot tub and dinner both nights!!! Amazing!


    I left school on Friday around 4pm and picked up Javier and David for the 3 hour ride over Santiam Pass through Bend to SunRiver.  I’d never met either before but
they turned out to be great guys.  As a matter of fact, the only people I knew on the trip beforehand were Meg and her husband
Justin, Kristen Splinter, and fellow new COAS student Greg.  It was great to meet so many terrific people and have such a good time.  When the three of us got there we ate a ton of homemade chili by Kristen and began drinking.  At 9pm a car load of girls showed up as well;  Jen, Lindsay, Julie, and Susie.  Then another car showed up with Matt who had told me he wasn’t going to need a ride because he had to write a paper instead!  Haha.  I
had bought a litre of 93 proof rum and began to get pretty drunk on
Friday night.  Most of the rest of the night was a bit blurry which I fully understood after waking up Saturday morning still a bit drunk to the empty bottle.  I apparently had played beer pong late into the morning hours with Matt but don’t recall it!  I also spent some time in the hot tub with the girls which was foggy as well.  I was told in the morning that the tracks in the snow next to the hot tub were of me running around before jumping back in!  One thing was for sure… I certainly let loose a lot of built up stress that night and had a hell of a good time.


    When I woke up Saturday morning I was still a bit drunk and had a cup of sphagetti
I had brought for myself and a couple v8’s.  Ironically I was the first
person with my eyes open at 8:30 running around to get my stuff ready.  David and I left for the mountain following Meg and Justin around 9:30am.  Bachelor was an amazing dormant volcanoe rising into the sky with beautiful views of Broken Back and The Sisters wilderness.  It was bluebird skies and despite the $60 holiday ticket price and crowds the lift lines were not horrible. 

    I do have to say I hate the lift line ticket-checking procedure there.  Each ticket
had to be swiped next to a large electronic board for verification
before a turnstile, that’s right, a freakin’ turnstile opened for you to walk through and re-join your group for the actual lift line.  I thought it was the stupidest system I have ever seen and much prefer the old school style of having a person there to interact with and guide you into place.  What is the skiing world coming to??? 

    The terrain was incredible.  The top of the volcano was massive bowls above
treeline and the below treeline the trees were perfectly separated for tree skiing.  Unfortunately the snow was very windblown up in
the bowl resulting in a sheet of ice several football fields in length with a pitch of about 45 degrees.  I got separated from David around lunch time and headed up to the summit to ski the bowl and had to straight-line most of it because it was impossible to turn on the
ice.  Luckily for the slope shallowed out into flats at the bottom so I could slow down.  After skiing from the summit (first time on the summit of a volcano) I headed down the mountain towards the terrain park I had heard so much about.  There was some fresh snow on the mountain
but it was only an inch or two deep and on top of hard crusty snow so backcountry skiing wasn’t much of an option as I had just figured out from the summit descent.  So off to the park I went. 

    Mt. Bachelor has one of the best terrain parks I’ve ever been to
and definitely the best superpipe I’ve ever ridden.  My balance was off because of drinking so much the previous night but I still challenged myself to hit the biggest jumps
offered and boost out of the pipe.  I ended up getting only about 5 or 6 feet out of the pipe but it was the highest
I saw anyone go while there and I managed to spin a mute 360 off a kicker in the park that sent me about 15-20 feet up and 40-50 feet in length.  If I had better balance I would have perhaps tried something a little bit harder… oh well.  When I got back to my truck I found a note left by David that he had gotten a ride home with others earlier… I guess I was the last person of our group off the mountain.

    Saturday night I took it a bit easier.  I played Anchorman for the group off my ipod which everyone enjoyed and then put on my High School Hip-Hop playlist.  This combined with drinking led to a drunken dance party that lasted about 2 hours.  Everyone got a kick out of the songs I had on my list that were all popular hip-hop and R&B songs before 1998.  Brought back a lot of memories for everyone I’m sure.  I was also blown away to hear an echo behind me as Young M.C.’s Bust a Move came on…  Meg Palmsten knew every word.  She’s only the 2nd girl I’ve ever met to know that song perfectly!  Haha.  I ended up teaching the girls how to play Bullshit Pyramid before covering Matt with snowboards, a plant and chair as he was passed out face down on the floor.  I’m not sure what time I went to bed but at least I went to bed in my own sleeping bag unlike Friday night when I woke up in someone else’s on the hard floor 10 feet from my blown up air mattress…. Geeze.  Although throughout the night I did have to hurl pillows and other objects at someone across the room snoring like a freight train!

    Nobody decided to ski on Sunday morning because we all knew it would be too icy and not worth the money.  So after cleaning up our mess for a couple hours we packed up and drove home, but not before Justin decided to nearly plunge his Honda Element into a nearby drainage ditch on the way out of SunRiver.  Luckily we found some chains and pulled him and Meg out.  Haha.  It was a great weekend of meeting new friends outside of my COAS bubble, drinkin’, partying and skiing.  Ski Trips are always a great time! 

Welcome Back, Where's Brendan?

Well, over the past couple days all
my friends have arrived back at COAS. On
Thursday I had lunch with Karen at McMenimins, I then got to go skiing yesterday with Tiffany and last night ended up
at Bart’s for a movie before meeting up with Anna, Logan and Eleanor at Bombs
for a Stairway Denied concert. Anna was
really happy to see me and I was super happy to have her back to have people to
talk to again. It was a pretty miserable
break for me. Only one problem… Where
the hell is Brendan? Last time I talked
to him he was stuck in New Mexico but where is he now… won’t return my text messages or phone calls. Starting to get worried.

Mt. Hood Meadows in a Blizzard

Today Chris
Holm and Tiffany Gregg and I decided to head up to Meadows on Mt. Hood
for some skiing. The area had been
getting dumped on for a good week and we thought that we would encounter tons
of powder…. Yes, and No. Yes, there was
powder but it was all windblown into small pockets in the trees and some of it
was so compacted that I wouldn’t even call it powder. The wind was blowing so fiercely that the
three of us could barely see 5 feet in front of our faces. This was the first time out this season for
Tiffany I believe and she ripped it up on her board despite the weather
conditions. I was really glad that we
had decided to take my truck in the morning because the roads were pretty nasty
getting up to the pass.

  We skied
hard the entire day and left around 3:30pm to head back to Chris’ brothers
place in Portland to drop off the gear we had borrowed (goggles for me, a pass
for Chris) in the morning. The whole
trip was rainy and windy. I got a call
from Mac who wanted to ride on Sunday but the weather looks terrible for then
as well. I really enjoyed riding with
Tiffany who, despite the weather and her uncovered frozen face, managed to keep
giggling her trademark giggle all day. It was some of the worst conditions I’ve ever skied in but of course I
had a lot of fun!

New Years Eve Shinanigans

Well, after a really miserable Christmas I was determined to have a spectacular New Years.  I had bumped into Aaron Hartz earlier in the week and he mentioned going up to SkiBowl on Mt. Hood for New Years eve because the mountain was going to be open until 2am with fireworks.  So, on sunday morning Aaron came over to my place and we both looked up places to stay for the night and found a hostel right at the base of East SkiBowl next to the chairlift for only 20 bucks a night!  Naturally that got us pretty amped cause it meant we didn't have to drive anywhere and could drink as much as we wanted to!

We made it to the mountain around 5pm after picking up some beers (including Hams beer) and deli meat and salad to save money on dinner.  We checked in to the hostel
with an extremely drunk man who Hartz said is a lifty there.  The guy said "I can't even crow" which totally confused me until Aaron explained that the crazy dude crows like a rooster incredibly loud when he sees people he knows coming down the hill.... Pretty cool local ski bum!  Anyway, after he barely made it through checking us in we both went back to the truck to shotgun two hams and down another while
eating sandwiches.  We then stuffed our pockets with Hams beers and hit the slopes.  It was a beautiful night with clear skies and we could actually see people shooting off fireworks all over Mt. Hood at Timberline as well as at Meadows.  Skiing at night with the full moon glow of Mt. Hood towering next to us was pretty amazing!

I've never skied so drunk before in my life.  It was a blast.  After slamming down two more beers on the chairlift to empty our pockets we actually hit up the terrain park, and the key word for us in it was "sloppy", although somehow we were both able to spin 3's off the first kicker in the park.  After a bunch of more runs we made it down
to the warming hut at mid-mountain to have 3 rounds of 16oz 7.8% imported beer.  That's when I also got a very drunken call from my girl Emily in Philly where it was New Years there (still 3 hours to go for Hartz and I).  We managed to finish up the rounds and ski some more but it seemed like the drunker we got the ballsier we got off
ledges.  Everybody on the lift was getting torn-up as well so whenever Hartz and I found ourselves on the edge of a cliff ban we kept hearing people yelling for us to huck them.... which in our stupor we actually did... sometimes successfully, sometimes
crashing into a yardsale at the bottom.  I'm still amazed that we didn't break something jumping on to boilerplate snow like that.  The impacts were amazing and hip-checking barely helped.  But as it goes with Aaron and I... if one of us does it, the other pretty much has to follow (male pride). 

At around 11pm we made it to the base and walked inside for a few more rounds of booze where we met up with some people who were staying at the condo's mountainside.  After a truly spectacular fireworks display while I called Emily we
chatted with them for a bit then took off with them in their Forerunner to their place.  When we walked in we found about 5 people passed out in the garage and about 8 more kids passed out upstairs (all of them had missed New Years sleeping).   The kitchen had about 20 bottles of booze strewn all about which explained the devastation of the place and the people sleeping there.  So, being awake and drizzunk we all decided to bust into the condo hot tub even though it was closed for the night.  I, always thinking, had thought to bring my bathing suit for just such an opportunity so I was prepared!  Aaron ended up in boxers!  I think somebody must have poured detergent or something in the tub as a joke because there was mountains of suds in the other end!  We we arrived there was already a couple in the tub (not really a tub because it was the size of a pool!) who had already broken in.  While Hartz got his groove on I ended up taking off back to the hostel. 

Damn!  I was locked out.  The hostel had locked the doors at 3am and it was 3:30am when I got back to the place.... so I essentially paid a drunk guy 20 bucks on New Years to Sleep in my truck in the parking lot!  Hartz came back about 30 minutes later and crashed in the passenger seat next to me.  I managed to grab a pillow and sleeping bag from the back before I passed out... It was a very cold walk back from the condo's to the hostel as well.

Hartz and I woke up at around 10am and headed to Government Camp to get some grub.  Man were we both hungover and had some funny shit to talk about.  I got a huge omelette and powered through most of it.  When we got back to SkiBowl it had begun to rain so we both decided to bail for the day based on the weather and our stomaches. 

Overall it was one of the best New Years I've ever had!  Very drunk, and skiing... only thing missing was my girl Emily, but atleast we both got to talk to each other! 

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