Spending Money.

This summer for me has definitly been a quest to make some money, and thanks to a friend of mine, I have discovered another way to get a little spending money in your pocket while possibly saving lives. I am talking about donating plasma.

If you don't mind needles on the bigger side going into your arm or getting a finger prick everytime you go in, then donating plasma is right for you. Right now, I've been going to a place in Minnesota called Biolife, although I'm pretty sure they have many locations around the U.S. The first appointment usually takes a while (mine took 3 hours) because they have to do a physical where they pretty much just listen to your heart and lungs and ask you a ton of questions about your history.

From there, the actual donating part takes about an hour once they begin to draw blood. Once they seperate the plasma from the blood, the machine actually mixes your blood with a saline solution and then it is pumped back into your arm to refill your blood and rehydrate you plasma has a lot of your bodies water in it.

At Biolife, the first time you go you get $40 for your donation, and after that if you donate twice a week, the first donation of the week is another $40 and the second is $20. They also give you a convienient debit card, and the money from each donation gets automatically loaded on there when you are done.

So hopefully everyone has some good summer jobs but if you're looking for making some extra dough while helping save lives, be sure to check out donating plasma near you. Peace.

Summer Shred... On Snow.

During the summer, there are many ways to keep one's lust for snowboarding by participating in the other various board sports. Lucky for me, some friends of mine at Coloardo Mountain College told me of a way to snowboard in the summer without paying thousands of dollars to go to summer snowboard camps in Oregon such as High Cascade. I'm talking of course about ice rink snow.

Now yes, you can't exactly build a terrain park such as the one at High Cascade out of ice rink snow, but there is still plenty of fun to be had with it.

My summer shred mission started out with a gray, dull, surprisingly cool summer day in which I had absolutely nothing going on. After being bored for quite awhile, I remember what I heard from friends about setting up some jib features with ice rink snow and I immediately got to work. I started by calling around to numerous ice rinks trying to find out when and where they dump the zamboni shavings. After a number of rinks said they dump it in a melting pit inside the building, I finally found one that was curious as to why I wanted to know about the ice shavings. The conversation went something as follows:

Me: "When and where do you dump the ice shavings after you zamboni the ice?"

Jesse (Ice Rink Attendent): "We have a melting pit in the building we dump it in."

Me: "So no one could come and pick it up?"

Jesse: "You want to pick up our ice?"
Me: "Yea."

Jesse: "For what?"

Me: "Snowboarding."

Jesse: "Snowboarding? Where are you going to put it?"

Me: "Just on the side of my house. There is a little hill there so we were going to set up a rail or something."

Jesse: "Well I suppose I could just dump it outside for you."

After talking to him about dumping times and a few calls to friends with trucks to haul it, we were ready to go.

For those of you in Minnesota who want to get in on some of this hot action, google Victory Memorial Ice Arena for the number and be sure to talk to Jesse because he's a really cool dude. It was his own idea to kick the public skaters off the ice early in order to zamboni a whole extra time just to get us another truckload of snow, so he's pretty legit.

These following three pictures are of my friends Ryan, who we refer to as Dub D or Ocean D, and PJ as we were in the process of shoveling all the snow we could into Ryan and my Lorries' trucks.

After getting a ton more snow than any of us thought we'd get, we headed back to me house to set up our feature, which we decided would be this party table I had in my garage that had a smooth surface and was perfect for buttering. The rest of these pictures are of the fun that insued, and hopefully I've inspired you to bug your local ice rinks to let you shred in the summer. Peace.