Hey ya'll! I finally finished my Jeremy Fish tattoo in late October and with waiting for it to heal and the crazy holiday times, I hadn't managed to get that personal photographer of mine to take some good photos of it until this week. I'm super happy with it! It's big, colorful, beautifully done, and very meaningful to me. Now that we're moving to Portland I'm thinking I might dedicate my arm to the places I live from here on out. Obviously I can't do it so massive every time unless I get some major arm enhancement surgery (or take some of those herbal pills I've heard so much about) but I think it'll be fun to find a great artist in each city that I live in and get a piece done with them. Conveniently, I already know an amazing artist in Portland. We've already discussed a few concepts involving pine trees, donuts, and monsters. Sounds cool eh? Here are the pics:

That cute wife of mine digs the new ink

Let me know if you dig it!

In other random news, I got my first crown done at the dentist last weekend and it's not as weird or painful as I thought. Scratch that, it is pretty weird. I have a temporary crown in until December 30th, so I can only chew on the right side of my mouth, perfect timing with the holidays! No fruit cake for me please ...

Speaking of the holidays, we are heading down to Santa Clarita, CA tomorrow to hang out with my parents for Christmas and Hanukkah and all that goodness. We're going to get cozy with the I-5 starting around 5-6 p.m. tomorrow and on Christmas Eve we're going to go see my Uncle Jim, Aunt Holly, my cousins Ryan and Sloane, and my grandmas. I'll also get to see my brother Mike — it's been a while! We're going to do some dinner and a game night with some of our best friends, Leslie & Adam and her family on Friday, and then on Saturday we're going to my stepdad's family's giant Hanukkah celebration (which we haven't been able to attend in like 4 years) and then hang out with our good friends Josh & Shannon and Kurt & Jessica later that night. Then we head back Sunday, work a bit, then on New Year's we're going to hang out with our friends David, his lady Jill, and his dog, Buddi. So it's going to be an action-packed couple of weeks! What are you guys up to for the holidays? Have any new year's resolutions I should hear about? I have a few in mind that I might perhaps blog about to add some sort of accountability to them. Anyway, happy holidays everyone!

Yo! How's everyone doing? I just got home from my second tattoo session with George and things are coming along awesomely. He got the color in the waves done and the shading done up top, and I'm going back for 1 (maybe 2) more session(s) to finish it up in a few weeks. Here's a not-so-great preview:

I'll get some better pictures of it up when it's not puffy, bloody, and wrapped in saran wrap.

We had an awesome time on our anniversary trip to Mexico! We spent 4 nights in Maroma Beach, which is about 30 minutes south of Cancun, at this awesome, beautiful new all-inclusive resort. Included in our activities was relaxing, sippin' drinks, visiting Chichen Itza, partially fishtailing our rental car before catching some air on a speed bump, etc. It was very relaxing and beautiful! Oh, and I can't stop talking about this—I'm not a big drinker, but while in Mexico, I tried "crema de tequila", and it's very delicious. I bought myself a bottle in fact, so if you get a chance to try it, I recommend it. Check out my lady's Flickr account to see some photos of the trip.

So I want to talk about a little something else that came along with our anniversary—as a gift to my wife, I made a nice illustration for her. Illustration is something I love and I'm always inspired by, and it's always been something I wish I was much better at. Especially when I look at all the stuff that my pals Josh and Colby make—very talented both as designers and illustrators. So I got a concept in mind for something I wanted to draw for Ashley for our anniversary. The way it was in my mind was awesome (of course) but I was extremely skeptical of whether or not I could pull something off that was half way decent. Here is my first stab at my concept in my sketchbook:

Pretty awesome, right? Not. I got a little discouraged after I finished this, but I showed it to Colby, he gave me some nice tips, I took a day while Ashley was away shooting a wedding, and I was actually very happy with the end result:

I did it on this 8.5" x 11" cardboard-ish paper that I really like using Micron pens and color pencils. It's pretty close to what I had in mind, Colby's suggestions helped me get it to look a bit more polished, and—the best part—Ashley loved it! So I'm going to try to work on improving my drawing here and there, and maybe post some more stuff on here in the future.

Howdy strangers, it's been a while! What's going on? A lot's been happening over on my end. I am fully entrenched into the iPhone and Twitter worlds of nerd-dom (things which were new to me in my last post). Eventually I'm sure I'll have some goofy thing on the site here where you can see my latest tweet, in case there's not enough useless stuff for you to look at on here.

You might have noticed a slight change in my header/navigation area—I decided it needed of slight touch of spiffing to make the nav a little clearer. Unfortunately though, I've been starting to get that 8-month-itch to redesign the whole damn site. I've been thinking of some ideas but if this site serves as any example, it will take years to pan out.

So you're probably wanting to hear the juicy goodness referenced in this post's title, so let's get down to it. I just recently turned the big 2-5 on August 16th and I've been wanting to get a tattoo for a while now so my lovely wife decided to make that her gift to me. The tattoo I decided to get is sort of a tribute to San Francisco and my love for the city. It's an awesome illustration done by my favorite San Francisco artist, Jeremy Fish.

Jeremy Fish's "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" piece. Photo borrowed from Fecal Face and taken from his Once Upon A Time book

I did a lot of searching to find the perfect artist to take care of it for me and, after some looking, found George Campise who works out of 7th Son Tattoo, which happens to be located within a couple blocks of the Cuban Council office. I found his portfolio online somehow and was really impressed with his work—especially his awesome coloring—so I made an appointment and I dropped off my copy of Jeremy Fish's 'Once Upon a Time' book with the piece in it, he traced it and added some sweet waves and turned it into a half sleeve. George turned out to be a very nice and super talented guy and he finished the black outline last Wednesday, August 20th, and I'll be dropping back in to start on the color in mid-September. Here's a peek just after getting it finished up:

Taken by guess who...

I'm totally stoked about it and can't wait to get it finished up!

The wife and I just had our 1 year anniversary on Monday (woo! high five wife!) and to celebrate, we've planned a trip to Mexico for a week starting September 7th. It should be really nice and relaxing and we're both looking forward to it.

I've been learning and experimenting a lot more than usual lately so I should have some more nerd-o code blogs coming up soon. Until then, let me know what you think of my tat and let me know if you might be getting any ink done soon. Bye!