A KEC Krew Christmas Carol

Merry Christmas Everyone!

The Things I do for Pie

In order for VG Kitten to make Pies for our Thanksgiving party I agreed to create a new character for his girlfriend.... The strips below are the result:

The Debates

The First Presidential Debate, The Weasel and The Intimidator:

The Vice Presidential Debate, Lord Cyclone and The Elephant:

KEC Krew Primary: Candidate Information

Breaking Election News From KNN

The League of Evil Primary is over and we have a surprise winner. 

After trailing for nearly the entire voting session The Weasel has claimed a 17-15 victory over Lord Cyclone.  As late as 11:30 PM is appeared that Lord Cyclone would pull out a victory, but The Weasel pulled into a 15-15 tie shortly after this point.

Two late votes pulled The Weasel into first and the victory.  Both sides have accused the other of cheating and it has yet to be seen how this may affect the rest of the race.  The League of Evil primary rules require the runner up in the primary to fill the Vice Presidential Candidate role.

Voting in the KEC Krew Primary begins later today.

Germany: Days 10-12

So it took a little bit longer to get this up than I thought it would.... but here are three entries to hopefully make it somewhat better. 

Day 10

Day 11

Day 12

Enjoy!

Germany: Day 9

The big day has arrived, the day you all have waited for, the day of our presentations!!!  I won't spoil the surprise though... you will in have read about it in:

Day 9

Enjoy!

League of Evil Candidate Information

Germany: Day 8

The conference continues as we go into the 8th day of the journal.  This entry may be a bit dry as for most of the day we sat and listened to presentations, not great journal entry material.

Day 8

Enjoy!

Germany: Day 7

We now get to the first day of the conference.  I didn't actually have any responsibilities so I just bummed around for most of the day and tried to prepare for my talk.


Day 7

Enjoy!

Germany: Day 6

We spend our last day in Munich and then experience the conference for the first time. 

All of this happens in the exciting:
Day 6

There is a tribute song to our hotel, for those interested in singing along, or in hearing the music:

Pearl Jam - Betterman

German: Day 5

Our trek through Germany continues as we draw closer and closer to the conference.  The first part of this day is kind of hard to read.... I will claim sleep deprivation as the reason.

Day 5

Enjoy!

Germany: Day 4

Hopefully, my loyal readers, you aren't yet bored with the Germany Journal, as we are not yet even halfway through with the fun and excitement.

Day 4

Enjoy!

Germany: Day 3

Hopefully, the first two days of the journal have been entertaining in some ways. We now move on to Day 3, which was ... exciting and stuff happened

Day 3

Enjoy!

Day 2

We now move on to Day 2 of the journal.

Day 2

Enjoy!

The Blog: Day 1

So I am sure that everyone is dying to read the blog that I kept during our travel through Germany. Well.... I will be posting it, day by day so as not to incredibly bore people to death.

I hope that it is at least somewhat enjoyable:

Day 1

This covers 9/9 and 9/10, due to the time difference.

Enjoy!

The sound of music!!!

Instead of wasting our time at the stupid Oktoberfest, who needs beer, we met up with Chris B. and Joey and headed to Salzburg, the home of the Sound of Music with unique tours of ... stuff
from the movie!!!


First we walked around city, and to our surprise found a miniature version of Oktoberfest, which is called the Bierfestival, or something like that. We are hungry, but want real food, so we move on.



After eating we decided to see the castle instead, especially after we saw the cool stairway that lead up to it.


The castle was awesome, we couldn't get up to the main castle, but we saw like 4 little castles, one of which had a cool sundial, which the guys intently studied, during my panorama.

What time is it?

The panorama turned out pretty awesome, but no Julie Andrews.


After the castle we headed back to the mini-oktoberfest and celebrated. I am not sure what we celebrated, but we had a good time. Here we are with our liters of beer.

Ziggy Zaggy, Ziggy Zaggy, Oi! Oi! Oi!

Some people started dancing on tables, it was an all around awesome time, and there was beer. Eric and I are hoping to walk around Oktoberfest tomorrow, so we will see how it compares.

Augsburg, Punk Town Germany

After the conference, Eric and I headed to Augsburg to visit Markus and Fabian, who kindly drove from Stuttgart to see us. It was a fun day. What follows are some pictures of the awesome trip/ bar crawl.

Augsburg

Our first exciting event was driving really fast on the Autobahn. I know this isn't all that great, but it was fun when we were doing it and was probably the fastest I had driven... This is a picture....



We got an old lady to take our picture as we walked around Downtown... she did an okay job, Markus was disappointed.

Us and a fountain

Then we went and had dinner and our first beer of the evening. We went to an Italian place and got pizza and lasagna.

You looking at me?

Then we went to another bar, peaches, of which I have no pictures, but we got some rum, which is rare in the US. I don't want to say where it is from, or I will get arrested.... After that Eric wanted a cigar, so... we got one, from the same place as the rum, and walked around, Eric thought he looked cool, you can be the judge of that.

Cigar time

Finally, we ended our night at Enchilada, in which we had to give a rose to a bachelorette. The rose was from the bathroom, so that was exciting...

We ended up messing up the table a little bit... but we were getting checked out by a table full of girls, that was pretty awesome.

All in all it was a fun night and it was good to see my German friends again.

Conference Fun

So the conference was a lot of fun... but I don't have a lot of pictures from it, so this post is kind of scraping from the bottom of the barrel.

Andechs Monastery


This is on our way to the Monastery for the final reception, I believe this is probably what a cow sees everyday.

Moo!

At the Monastery we got to see the abbey, or whatever, Martin seems very impressed...

Finally we got to the dinner. We got to see lots of cool stuff, like the picture of the pope, for example, as well as drink a lot of free beer, for example.


Finally we got to the meal, which was dumplings and pig and gravy, and pig skin....? It was pretty good.


Loyal readers may have read on Eric's blog that I won the Best Paper award. Surprisingly this is true. I don't have a picture to prove it since at the time I won it, I was so surprised that I didn't get a picture, but trust me I did.

Last Day in Munich

Our last day in Munich, was not spend in Munich, we took a trip to Dachau and then headed to the conference.

Dachau Castle Grounds
Unfortunately, everything was closed.... So we just walked around, it was kind of interesting as the city is older than Munich, but wasn't what we had been planning on. We were able to sneak (through an open gate) into the english garden of the castle, which was pretty cool.


A Panorama of the Castle and surrounding grounds. Or as Eric would call it a "Panoramajama"

A Cool Tree Tunnel

Me and the Castle

Herrsching
We next went to the conference. Since we are cheap we walked the 2 km from the train station to the hotel. As you can see in the picture below the weather is perfect.

So far the conference has not had a lot of picture opportunities, other than perhaps the rather sketchy laundry room that I used....

Hope you enjoyed the pictures... more to come once we turn our room into the party room ;).

Tempting Fate

We touched the lucky lions twice today (Sunday), so we may have been tempting fate a little bit. Eric's (at the moment) non existent post will probably tell more of the story. He is doing conference stuff. I wasn't required to stick around .... so I only stayed for half.

Residenz
We went to the royal palace and treasury today and saw some cool stuff

This statue, has an amazing amount of diamonds and precious pearls on it. It is of St. George slaying a dragon.

These are some of the pieces to a cool chess set, which Eric is sure to blog about, very intricate, much like everything else in the treasury.
Eric checking out the Antiquarium, which is the oldest room in the building and had some cool busts of people, like Ceaser, and a lot of people I don't know.

The Street Festival
After we touched the lions the first time we had no idea what to do, so we decided to walk along the street. Like magic a street festival appeared before our eyes. Despite the rain we slogged our way to the end, stopping for some currywurst along the way.

Currywurst (Brats with curry pepper

We saw a lot of booths and some dancers and a lot of rain, one booth in particular caught my eye.

A Car that runs on beer?? Isn't that better suited for drinking?

After we finished walking through the street festival we debated touching the lions for a second time. Eric said it would be greedy, I said it would be fine.... the result was.... us drenched in rain for the walk back and all the buildings we wanted to go to closed... perhaps Eric was right.

To the Castle

Another Day in Germany. This time we are going to be staying in a castle, which is very cool. This happened last night, but sadly there was no internet connection. I am sure Eric will provide more information, but here are some pictures to help pass the time.

Ice Cream, It's whats for dinner

So the castle is really cool, but sadly, they have no food, so we take an excursion to the town of Pullach, to find a grocery store. We buy 8 ice cream sandwhichs, and some other, non important, real food.

Eric the Waiter

So we got breakfast for free, but we had to bus and clean our tables. Eric did it very well... I just took pictures.

Exploring the Castle

So instead of taking the non-existent tour we instead wondering around the castle trying to open random doors.

We found this kind of cool room, but we mostly wanted to make it to the top of the castle tower. We eventually found the staircase and started climbing, we nearly made it to the top before we ran into:

Luckily for us there was still something cool at the "top" of the tower. An awesome and slightly smelly bathroom.

I guess he really has to go?

A Panorama of the Castle Courtyard

Munich Day 3: A Minor Malfunction

So... my camera was on the fritz for a bit... nothing a few euros couldn't fix and make me feel really stupid. Basically, I forgot to charge my battery before I left. :(

Anyway, here are some pictures to accompany Eric's previous blog post.

A Boat

This was the leading boat at the marine exhibit. It was, uh... cool?

Don't Touch!

This robotic looking object was actually a deep sea diving suit. It had a don't touch sign on it... Eric touched it anyway.

Look out Snoopy! Here comes the Red Baron!!

This was part of the aviation exhibit at the Deutsches Museum, It couldn't find any information about whether it actually was the Red Baron's plane, but I also didn't find any that said it wasn't. So I will assume it was.

They have Map Coloring in Germany too!

So this may not excite a lot of people, or anyone, but I got a kick out of it.

View From the Sundial Garden

This is a panorama of half the view from the sundial garden. It was at this moment that my battery died. So I have no more pictures of the day....

Hope you all enjoyed it!

In Which I Steal Eric's Blog and add pictures!!

So Eric's blog post was pretty darn verbose, and I don't know if I can beat it. In an effort to have the better blog, I am adding pictures from my camera. Luckily, Eric forgot his camera cable, so I have the upper hand. A picture is worth a thousand words right? So that will mean I have a lot of words. None of these pictures contain me... those are on Eric's camera.

FIRST BEER!!!

I would like to say this was meant to be an artistic shot, and it actually turned out quite well. However, I was just scared of the barkeep and was trying to take the picture as secretly as possible. One thing I've noticed here: all the people that I get food from seem like they dislike me.....

LION DRINKING BEER

So this is in the middle of the fairground type area where they were setting up Oktoberfest, I am not sure if this tower is always there, but it was pretty cool. Somehow there is a floating beer mug, which I didn't mean to get, but it looks... interesting?

The citizens of Munich are larger and slimier than expected.

While walking around on our first night we ran into this giant snail. It was nice enough to let Eric pose without before it meandered off into the Germany night. For some reason dogs really liked this statue.

Some German Building with our tour guide.

This is some famous building that I don't remember off the top of my head, but this picture was added because it has Frankie, our bike tour guide. He was a really cool guide and can supposedly drink 7 liters! of beer in one night. (I am not sure what to think about that, I am pretty sure I would be dead the next day, he was giving a tour)

Touching the lions for luck

This is one of the four lions that we could touch to bring good luck, considering that the day was pretty good and we lucked out in some things, the lions must have worked.

An Oom-pah Band at Hofbräuhaus

To be honest I would have rather have gotten a picture of a Bavarian beer maiden, but I had 2 liters too few beer so I chickened out, and they were just working... So I took a picture of the band. They were pretty cool... not as cool as the beer maidens though.

All in all it was a fun day, don't worry I saved plenty of pictures to bore you with upon my return to the states.

Eric's post, that actually explains the day