My new home in St. George

There have been a number of minor changes in my life recently. One of them is that I moved from Las Vegas to St. George, Utah. (Luckily, I'm still in the desert so I won't have to change the name of my blog.)

A few of my friends/family said they'd like to see some pictures of my new apartment. Because I like to make my friends happy, I took a bunch of pictures, and I've posted them below...

I get a covered parking spot of my very own. And as you can see, everyone else is afraid of the new guy's car. Once they get to know it, they'll realize it's friendlier than it looks.


This is a picture of the path that leads to my flat. Almost looks like Southern California, eh?


This is my apartment, as seen from the outside. There's a (carpeted) patio and rock garden behind the fence wall.


Once you go through the front door, you're in the living room. Ahead of you is the kitchen and dining area (which has an enormous mirror on the back wall to scare people heading to the refrigerator for a midnight snack). The first door on the left goes to my room, the second one is a walk-in pantry. On the right of the living room are stairs up to a loft, which is open to the living room below. Below the stairs, off of the dining area, is the laundry closet.

This picture is taken from the front door...


...this one is taken from the front right corner of the living room...


...and this picture is looking at the front door from the dining room.


Here's a picture of my kitchen:


This picture looks up at the loft from the living room:


Here are a couple of pictures of my room; the first one looking in from the door, the second one taken from the door of the bathroom. The third picture is, of course, my bathroom. (I haven't decided what to do with the awesome southwestern theme, yet.)




These pictures show the loft, seen from the top of the stairs. In the second picture, you can see the door to a storage room (above the master suite) on the left, and a closet door and bathroom sink on the far wall. The third picture is another view of the upstairs bathroom (the important parts of which are behind their own door), and the fourth picture is looking into the storage room.





So that's about it. That's my apartment. Hopefully seeing it has made you want to come visit me here in St. George. If sleeping on a bed is important to you, you might want to wait a while until I can afford to put a guest bed upstairs. Or maybe I'll just put a ping pong table up there. But who'd want to sleep on a ping pong table?

Per Judd Fry: "IT WAS ALL A PACK OF LIES!"

I've been living a lie for too long; the people deserve to know the truth. Well, not the people, per se, but some people. So I'm breaking the long silence to inform my readers that, in reality, I DID visit Keith and Ann in California. In addition, I DID make several trips to various locations around the world. (The French periodical L'Equipe's claim, however, that I have been implicated in the disappearance of the Sphinx's nose is completely false.)

One stop that I made during my globe-trotting escapades was in Logan, UT, to visit my brother Sam. An account of that visit will be posted in the near future...

The California Conspiracy

Some of you may have seen Ann's recent blog postings; the ones claiming to have pictures of a weekend in which Keith, Ann, and I enjoyed a pleasant tour around the Bay Area. In this post, I will disprove those claims by showing compelling photo evidence that I was NEVER THERE, and that the weekend in question was actually fabricated, possibly as part of a greater government conspiracy.

Bay Bridge Baffle:

Ann claims that Keith and I were seen together on the Embarcadero, near the Bay Bridge. This photo clearly shows that there was no one there. If Keith and I or anyone else had been standing there, this photo's lovely composition and picturesque view would have been obstructed by two (unsightly) heads.

Ghirardelli Squ-where?

Ann claims to have a picture of me standing on a pier near to and overlooking Ghirardelli Square. However, the photo below, a photo taken the VERY SAME DAY, shows that neither I nor Ann and Keith were on that pier.

Furthermore, a picture of the Ghirardelli building (shown below) from the same day shows that NO ONE was present. Not Keith, not Ann, not me - not anyone at ALL, for that matter. I would clearly have wanted to visit this famous building if I were in San Francisco, but the photo shows that I paid no such visit. Ann's blog offers no evidence to refute this fact.

Coastal Conundrum:

Ann's blog shows a picture of me standing on a rock with waves crashing behind me, as if to prove that I was at the ocean. One of the pictures shows only a shadowy figure, whose identity cannot be established. The second photo shows a picture of a man cleverly disguised to look similar to me, but whose torso proportions are grossly exaggerated. And I do mean grossly. This imposter easily outweighs me by 30 pounds. In addition to this, shown below is a photo of the same location - the very same rocks! - which shows beyond dispute that I was not on that rock.

Golden Gate Gaffe:

Next in Ann's blog, we see a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, which agrees completely with the photo evidence in my archives - as seen below:

The very next picture shows what LOOKS like Keith and me standing next to the bridge. Irrefutable historical data, however, tells us that the Golden Gate Bridge towers are actually 746 feet tall - MUCH taller than either Keith or myself. How could WE be the ones towering over the towers? We couldn't; the towers are in reality at least twice as tall as us. The picture is a fabrication.

Next, Ann shows us pictures depicting me standing with Keith, but also me standing with Ann, in front of the Golden Gate Bridge again. Which is it, Ann? I couldn't be standing there with BOTH of you. The truth is, I was standing with neither, as the following picture clearly shows. There were a lot of people there, but I'm sorry, I just wasn't one of them.

The Stinson Secret:

Ann's blog appears to contain compelling evidence that I was standing right on the very sands of Stinson Beach. This is a very carefully crafted and almost convincing picture. My unwearying desire to uncover the truth eventually led me to the discovery of a picture that tells the REAL story.

It is clear from this picture, obtained by the great sacrifice of resources and lives, that it was not me that was standing on that beach posing for a photo at all. It was ANN! Evidently pleased by the idea of creating a hoax of this magnitude, she is grinning as she poses as Jake. Obviously some expert hands were required to cut out a picture of me and glue it over the photo of her, but the fact that I am much larger than her made it easy to cover up Ann completely. The long shadows of sunset make it virtually impossible to tell that the shadow in the photo is not actually mine, but hers. Luckily, the photo shown above preserves hard evidence of the truth.

My hope is that the evidence presented in this blog post is sufficient to pull back the curtain of the California Conspiracy for the deserving eyes of John Q. Public, and perhaps may even someday convince Ann of the error of her blog's ways. Until that day, all I ask is that you do your part to promote the preservation of truth and the abolishment of lies. And watch your backs, because the next conspiracy could involve YOU.

This is my new mountain bike. I bought it used from a co-worker a couple of weeks ago to help me enjoy the things that the Great State of Nevada has to offer - like dirt, rocks, dusty trails, and strong winds.

Yesterday my roommate Andrew and a guy named Chris and I took our bikes into the desert near Blue Diamond, which is a tiny town outside of Las Vegas. We rode for miles and miles, but somewhere out in the middle of nowhere Andrew's bike threw a shoe. Well, it got a flat tire. We weren't able to repair it, so he started walking out, as we followed him on our bikes. Eventually we got to a part of the trail that wasn't too far from a state highway, so Andrew and Chris walked out to the road, leaving me the key to the car that got us to the trailhead in Blue Diamond. Andrew was the only one of us who had riden in that area before; in retrospect it would have been a better idea to have him ride one of the functional bikes out to the car and come back to get us. But instead he pointed out the way to me, and I forged ahead (can you "forge ahead" on a trail that's already there?) on my own. Where Andrew told me to go didn't take me back to the car, though. It didn't even take me back to Blue Diamond. I ended up backtracking a couple of times, traversing a few hills, following a dry stream bed, crossing two barbed-wire fences, and finding my way to Blue Diamond highway, about 4 miles away from the actual tiny town. Once I got to that road, I faced a 25-mph headwind that was too much for my feeble legs to handle at that point, so I went the rest of the way switching between riding and walking. Once I got there, I drove back and picked up the other guys, who had stopped at a gas station and were knocking back gatorades. I was happy to see that none of us had died. I learned at a young age (from Scooby Doo) that splitting up a group almost never leads to good things, but in our case everything turned out okay. And fortunately, it looks like Andrew's bike will be able to be repaired and won't need to be put down.

Hi! It's me - Jake. Over the next few months, you will be able to watch my blog transform from a piece of junk put together by a guy who has no idea what he's doing, to one of the greatest blogs the world has ever known. Okay, it might be over the next few years....

But that's okay. It's a work... in progress.