"This is for all my friends and family..." this one's gonna be my very last blog entry. I'm finally done, sitting in my virgin amercia plane, enjoying some good music and watching the plane on the monitor getting further and further away from paradise towards home. Talking about my feelings right now would be a waste of time. I guess everybody knows how much I loved it over here. On the other hand I'm surely excited about all of you, all my friends and family.

The last two weeks went by so quick, I didn't even had the time or thoughts to update my blog, I just enjoyed the last days as much as I could. I stopped working one week ago, finishing all my projects, getting my stuff packed, cleaning up my workspace and finishing my retarded internship report. Since Claudio and Stella were still there, I hung out with them and finally went surfing again after my tattoo-winter-break, and honestly I hated it. I had such a wipeout at venice beach, I guess I made about three frontflips, touched the ground and just didn't know how to get up again, cause the current at this day was insane. But finally I made it up to the top again and spend the rest of the surf in the whitewater.

Last weekends moto was: Paardy Haardy! We went to a bar at Venice on Friday night, getting some booze, watching the opening ceremony of the olympic winter games and met another celeb there. For all the girls, that might interest you, he played some guy in Dawsons Creek and appears now on my new fav trash series Life Unexpected. Other than that we got drunk and talked about surfing and finally I met a windsurfer again, felt good not only to talk about shortboards, flat days or shorebreaks any more;) Sho, my bro came down from the UCSB and so we hung out on saturday, played some basketball and stuff. Kijo, my 17 year old (how he introduces himself) dad threw a farewell party for me and his buddy that night. Met some cool people, got a look into the theory about making tequilla and of course got wasted again:-)


With no work to do left and some great weather coming up the motto was clear: GO SURFIN DUDE... I first considered to head downtown again, see some cool buildings or visit some art shows....but honestly...NO WAY! Hahahaha! I spend 4 days hanging out at the beaches of Malibu at 25 celcius and perfect weather and conditions. Since the surfers beach in Malibu is a pointbreak and mostly surfed by longboarders it's much more chilled. Just hanig out in the water, catch a wave from time to time and enjoying the beautiful suroundings. I met a cool guy, probably 50 years old and 280 pounds heavy, born and raised in Malibu and he told me all about the surfing and life there. It was pretty awesome, thats what I love about hanging out in the water, meeting people, talking for a sec, catching a wave, come back and have fun. And finally I enjoyed surfing again. No whitewater fights anymore, not getting pushed down by huge waves just relaxed attempts to finally ride the wave for more than 10 seconds. Well not that I was successful but I had fun and even made my first crappy bottom turns. After getting out of the still pretty cold water, I hung out at the beach, getting some good color and listening to songs of the Ataris. Lets call my last couple of days: PERFECT.

And finally finally, I got my first parking ticket! Wow after over 160 days, parking almost everywhere, they caught me at 9pm in an alley using a preferred parking. Here comes the joke: 61$. Hahahaha! Are you shitting me?! You could use a disabled parking twice, any time of day in Germany. So I guess I finally found a bad fact about the US, tickets are insanely high. Margaret just told me about her last ticket, 450 bucks, cause she used the carpool lane accidently ;) So, whatever, pay em, screw em, hate em. Idiots.

I invited my boss Jochen his bro and my entire family for a dinner last night. But not that I'm a lazy boy and go with them to a restaurant, no way, you know me better. I made them some Kaessspaetzle, yeeeeeha! And it should turn out to be one of the dumbest ideas this stupid brain ever brought out. First of all, of course I didn't had the right flour for making the "Spacelies" and of course you won't find the type of cheese you need (well I wouldn't even know which one was right, but anyways) I went for the quadro formaggio, the italians had to help me out. Okay next thing, "do you have this machine, like going round and round to mix up the ingredients?" (haha still no idea how its called), luckily Margaret had one, sadly I almost broke it cause my mix was pretty heavy duty;-) So this meant I hat to mix it all together by menpower (after 3 hours of surfing that day) but whatever, I made it. Next step, making Spaetzle without a Speatzlespress.... I thought that wouldn't be a biggie, took a some aperature, refunctioned it and it took me 50minutes to make all spaetzle with my bare hands...so you see, Mr. Stupid in his element! But apparently it was all worth it. It tasted awesome, didn't expect it to be that cool but no kidding it was delicious. So we ate, listened to good music and talked about radom things. Pretty cool last night, nothing fancy but good times.

As my music turns again now into "This is to all my friends..." and the plane is somewhere over Kansas City it's time to finish this post, or well the entire blog. That's it, I really enjoyed blogging, hope you had fun with it and I could give you a sneak peak into my life over here. It's all over now, but I'm sure I'll definitely come back soon. Next stop is New fucking York! Meeting my sister and mum over there, pretty stoked about that. Gonna be some great days before I gotta head home again. But then I finally meet all of you again, all my friends, family and my old man Bruce.


That's it, thank you for reading. Thank you California for the best 6 months I've ever had so far in my young life, talk to you later ;)

Take it easy everyone, see you at the 28th!

Don

The Swellers on - upandgo! Allrighty Cowboys and Girls, hope you all are getting prepared to see your boy again! Time runs, I can't tell, apparently I even forgot to blog last week, just too much going during my last days. Not even two weeks and I will freeze my butt off in New York City baby, meeting my dodo and mummy. And then another week and I'm back home, with bruce, the wingmans and all my other guys over there.

Oh well I should start with the week before this week, even I can't really remember that much though....I guess last weekends parties did its best and deleted a lot on my harddrive :-) No, honestly, I can hardly remember what was going on the last week. I guess it was the week we went to Hollywood again, to see one of the best shows ever. This time next year were really awesome, followed by the all time mind blowing Strike anywhere, but the winner of the eve was Four Year Strong, man I can tell, this band kicked ass, BIG TIME! Probably the best live band ever seen. So there is one show left here in the states. I'm gonna see Set your goals once more, joined by Motion City Soundtrack and my new favourite Band out there The Sweller, dude, this sound is pretty rad! Awesome, love it!

After a emberassing long drink-drank-drunk-break in the last time we wanted to get it hard last saturday. I and Claudio were in the mood to get shitfaced and show the american party people how WE party, well....he did, I didn't...I had to deal with the effects of fast and much drinking pretty early that night, so it turned out not to be that much fun for me, but anyways...the night started awesome, Cynthia, a friend of Stella and Claudio took us to a huge loft appartement and three bands happened to play in the living room, dude this was sick! Imagine your flat is big enough that you easily can fit in 200 people and 3 bands...definitely awesome....the rest of the night, you know...not worth writing too much about:-)


On Sunday we went for a coffee with Matt, a very very nice swiss guy I got to know the last weeks and his gf Lilly, a mexican girl, also pretty nice and funny. But my stomach and my tired eyes killed me, so the best thing I could do was sleeping! My workweek started pretty cool, I finished my internship report and started to finalize all my projects, which actually can be pretty anyoing, cause you want it all perfect and bugfree and this costs plenty of time...but lets not talk about work, lets talk about AVATAR!!!!

Okay here's the story, as I mentioned in an earlier blog entry and all over twitter and facebook, my coworker Brian invited me to join him on his writerclub screening series for the movie AVATAR. And here's the best thing, including a QNA with director (also of Titanic) James Cameron. (by the way I might mix weeks and dates now, never mind) So yeah, what should I say, AVATAR is probably one of the best movies I've ever seen, I only watched it in 2D though, but anyways, good reflection of the human race, lets see how this all will end. But really astonishing was the appearance of director James Cameron, he made tons of money with his two most famous movies Titanic and Avatar and still is one of the coolest and laid back guys out there. The interview was pretty awesome, lots of humor and cool ideas! The intellectual writers didn't have any chance, he teased em constantly, I just loved him.

From one highlight to the other (thats my motto right now :-) ). Waking up on wednesday in the bright californian sun, ready to head to the California Speedway. My boss, which is one hell of a cool guy, took me and Claudio kart racing. So we headed east, through whole LA till we arrived at the California Speedway. We got off the car and couldn't believe our eyes, these karts weren't the ones we were used to from Germany or Italy.

My boss told us he wants us to have fun, not to get bored, so he rented us a kart with 30PS and 70miles, which are about 120kmh maximum speed. And that was SICK!!! I had sooo much fun, you wont believe it! The first rounds were a bit scary cause I just couldn't believe how much power they had and how fast you could accelerate. The boss drove a kart which was even faster and also had a shiftgear....oh man haha, he's out of his mind, but in a really really good way! We raced for almost and hour in sum and were exhausted like hell afterwards, but I tell you, that was one of the best experiences I made here.
 


After finishing some work at the office afterwards we headed to Silverlake, a part of LA I have barely been before. We met a couple of Stellas friends, some sweedish and american dudes, and we had a lot of fun going to this german restaurant. All styled like an old bavarian restaurant, a really lovely place, the food sucks though, but the beer rules and thats what counts isnt it?!?! :-) Afterwards we went to a pretty crazy mexican bars and alternated between beer and tiredness. That was the motto of thursday and friday, I was just soo tired, fell asleep a lot to early everyday but who cares (wow this hasn't been here in a while :-) Yesterday was cool, we went to a bar in Venice, partied with Matt and the other swiss guys, talked, drank and had fun.

But today was the day! I decided to buy tickets for the NHL game between the Kings and the Redwings last week, what a good decision! After making some errands in Santa Monica I  headed down town to the staples center. My seat was in the uppest level, but as it should turn out it was pretty rad up there, saw everything and had a bunch of funny guys around me. The Kings happened to do pretty good the last games, 8 wins in a row and counting. So I was pretty excited, it also was the first live sports event I had here in the states. It was awesome, I mean the crowd wasn't as excited as they were supposed to be and the game looks a lot slower live but anyways, I ruled man, awesome!


The Redwings (or like the kings fans around me called them "Chickenwings - the only good wings") led three to nothing after the first period, the kings sucked big time. But this should change with the second period, the Kings scored 2 or 3 goals, man the crowd turned crazy after the third goal. With 4 minutes to go the Kings made the deal with the four to three and everybody counted down the time to the ninth win in a row! And it happened, man it was sooo great, still stoked, still in the GO KINGS GO mood haha!






Since I was in the hockey mood all day I went ice skating in Santa Monica tonight. Stella, Claudio, Michaela, John and a bunch of others were allready there at the open air ice rink. It felt really cool to stand on skates again, especially a couple of hours after having seen the Kings live and in color. After a nice dinner at a thai place I'm ready to sit back, watch a movie and get prepared for the SUPER BOWL tomorrow!!! Yeahha, I don't know what to expect but I guess it is a reason to drink anyways! ;-)

Allrighty here is one last video for you, the national anthem of the game today, sang by a I don't know, 8 to 10 year old girl, absolutely great. I love the theme of the anthem, and the americans love it tooo!






GOD BLESS AMERICA ;-)

Have a good one guys, oh wait, one last thing haha, I came home and noticed that our huge garden was gone. Instead of a nice view outside the window everything was covered with a tree. Margaret came back and told me the story haha that is sooo sick. We have a huuge tree in our garden, apparently all the rain in the last days washed out the ground and the tree was getting too haevy and just fell down. And believe me that tree is huge, could have distroyed our whole garage or the neighbours pool, but no, it fell straight into the garden but cut all the powerlines hahaha! So the entire street, included the Vons supermarket were out off power, wow felt like back in the days of jesus christ or something haha just kiddin. Yeah, man, wow, haha what a day.

But now, after 1500 words its time to end this misery!Gotta go, take care guys and leave comments if you want to:-)
Yours sincerly Donovan

Good evening snow-covered Germany and rain-soaked LA, what's up?
This is your boy from LA who started blogging every day and probably ends in a monthly update soon:-) Seriousely, it's so amazing how this blog probably reflects my stay here in the US. The firts couple of days or weeks, nearly everything was so special and new to me and it should turn out that after 4 months nearly everything becomes usual, maybe sometimes to usual. I got 3 more weeks left and I will enjoy them as much as I can but I tell you - time flies!

Lets start this post with the weather, what a conversation-starter ah?! The girls love it!:-) Lets say, last week was wet. ;-) No seriousely, last week was also pretty rainy, from time to time bit of a sunshine but in general it seems to be "winter" right now, which means 10 to 15 degs every day with lots of windy and rainy times. And not to forget a lot of snow in the mountains, I just saw the news yesterday and Big Bear and the surounding mountains just seem to sink in the snow.

I've spent most of the last week with working and healing out my feet, which was pretty hard in the beginning. The second foot hurted like hell, a lot more than the left one, but probably my body still tried to get the first one fixed and was just not ready for this shit:-) After a couple of days the hurt turned into itching and finally I transformed into a snake, loosing all of my upper skinlayers. So when I woke up in the morning, my lower end of the bed was covered with a bunch of coloured skin. But hey, I can wear shoes again haha! Isn't that great? No hippie stuff anymore, the alternative-organic-week is over! ;-)

Claudio, a buddy from Ulm and former intern of the T-Sign studios is here with his gf to spend 3 weeks of chillin and travelling. That's pretty cool, so we went to venice on thursday to hang out at a bar, enjoying some lousy Oettinger Woiza, well no, but something similar to that. Claudio is a great kid, and his Stella lived in LA for over 2 years, so she knows em all:-) Which I should experience at her grill party on saturday night. It was pretty cool, lots of different people and appearently more europeans than americans haha, sucks though! We ate, we talked, we drank and stuff like that, it was awesome, lots of great talks and funny people. Sadly I couldn't couldnt give me the total shot cause I had no place to crash, so my bro Sho picked me up and I went to bed too early for that night:-)

Sunday was pretty cool, I went to the shopping mall to buy a basketball and threw some baskets at the backside of the house, just like in the movies. But I'm really in a bad shape, hell man, I should go running and stuff again, cause after my arrival in rat-country Germany I gotta play two Icehockey turnaments and I don't wanna suck there. But anyways, sunday was really the day of being a 10 year old boy again, first basketball and then skateboarding, haha, I can't remember when I skated the last time in my life, so I grabbed Kenjis skateboard and cruised down the streets of westchester, awesome time, felt like surfing:-) To end the day I went down to the beach to get some beautful sunset scenes. Really, California has one of the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen, but convince yourself, sick stuff:



Brian, my projectmanager, took me to a movie screening yesterday. He's in a writers club or stuff like that, whatever;-) and he got an invitation for some screenings this week and so he asked my join him. The movie called "The Hurt Locker" is definitely one of the best movies I've ever seen. It's so strong with his audiovisual storytelling, sick! And afterwards the director was on stage for a discussion. Pretty pretty cool, she was a great artist, lots of good ideas and methods, loved it. Check out the movie, it's definitely worth watching it!

And now here I am, tired like hell and a lot work today for tonight, but screw it, some pump-ups for the bloodpressure, some cereals for my tiny brain and there we go!
See you soon guys, get prepared, I want a sweet welcome over there.

Appearently, or at least what they keep telling me, we have the year of El Nino right now, what means that there is a huge storm system goin crazy over the pacific and bring us some rainy and windy days and some pretty gnarly waves all over the place. I headed to Arcadia today and went through the streets of LA and I tell you, haha, you need a boat right now! Of course my Toyota-Baby can handle this easly but I've seen some Jeeps out there which were covered up with water higher than the bumper! Boy! Los Angeles is finally sinking, and there are 3 more rainy days to come! Yeeeha, seems like a lot of chaos and anarchy - I love it! I really missed the rain the last couple of weeks, so after waking up today and seeing the rain I felt like: "Oooohhjaaa boy, here we go!"

Actually my last week was really great, not that much to do at work, and the things I had to do turned out to get really really cool! I had to work at a clients office, editing some video footage, nothing special, BUT, the great thing about this client - he develops race car simulators! And of course he has one at his office, absolutely crazy stuff, 3 40" Monitors, real pedals, steering wheel and racing seat - everything attached to a hydraulic system wich shakes your balls like crazy if you sit in there. Pros, like Lewis Hamilton allready have been driving this monster and he sells them to all the sheiks. Chris, the owner, was like: "Ey don, to really understand what the simulator and the videos are all about you better drive your ass off at this thing"...and so I did!

Like today, I've already headed to Arcadia last thursday to meet the dudes of the Nice Guy Tattoo out there, Tom and his gang. A bunch of really lovely and talented guys I commited my feeds to. After a short introduction, Tom got started to hurt me for about two hours, same today, but since we are boys with balls like bulls, we somehow can handle it hahaha! But it was really fun out there, watched some movies beside it and told stories of our lives. But now I have a problem, I always gotta head to LA if I get my next tattoos in the future, cause I'm so happy with these guys and the result, but I guess it's a good excuse to HAVE to spend a couple of days in LA :-)

My weekend was pretty nice too, lots of laying in bed taking care of my foot but also some fun things to do. Friends of Karen came over on Friday, we had a few beers, good food, some booze and a lot of fun games. In the bitter end I started to show em Mäxle, which should turn out to be really fun, seems like everybody enjoyed lying to each other big time:-) So in the end all of the soberness had left the bodies and stumbled out of the house or in bed and I slept like a baby.

The famous NAMM show took place these days in LA. It's one of the biggest, might be even the biggest, Music Exhibition in the world. My buddy Ned, whos buddy is the owner of Kramer Guitars, arranged some VIP tickets for me and him. But after all the chaos, my lost phone and a bunch of misscommunications we didnt make it there together on saturday, which really pissed me off, was really looking forward to that, but yeah, I screwed it uppa, my fault. So I went there on Sunday, Leo, met me there, gave me my pass and showed me around at his booth (with one of the HOTTTEST girls on the entire show:-) and then I made my way through all of the halls, pretty amazing stuff out there, tons of new drums and cymbals, absolutely great! Had a blast back there! Thanks again to Ned and Leo for setting this up for me. Heres a coustom built drumset for the NHL Hall of fame, mindblowing!!! And for all of you fans of Yellowcard you can try to identify the drummer of em here.


Yeah, thats probably it for my weekely update! 5 more weeks left, dang! Really don't wanna go back, but lets enjoy the next couple of weeks like crazy, once my feet are healed I'm gonna rock'n'roll the bones outa me! Can't wait for Wednesday when my buddy Claudio, former inter, from Ulm shows up, gonna be nice nice nice!

Hang in there guys, take care, take it easy!

Heeeey jooooo! Whats cracky-lacky?!?! How the hack are you all out there in Daisies Winterwonderland?

I know, I know, I know, it has been a pretty long time since my last update, I'm sorry, or well I'm not but at least I pretend to be. You all know the reason why I didn't update, I was on tour for over 2 weeks through Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California. Josie, Annso and Magge visited me over the Christmas and New Years days and I can tell you: WE HAD A BLAST out there!!! We've seen some of the greatest nature I've ever seen, traveled a lot of awesome places, seen tons of crazy people and drove over 3000 miles.

I just enjoyed the time with my dearest ones and this beautiful country. I don't wanna blog about it too much, cause it would be far too much to report about, I uploaded some pictures and working on a movie of the trip right now which I will all show you personally when I'm back home. Here are some of the best pics taken, well we took over 1200 and every one was worth it, but here are some you might get jealous of:





Yeah this time was really amazing, and I think it will be in our heads for a long long time. Especially the last night. So the thing was, my buddies stayed at a motel near my house for the last 2 nights of the trip, I slept at home and we went to Venice, Downtown and stuff. After seeing the most astonishing view of LA at the Grifith Park Observatory I dropped them at the motel, already wanted to wave them goodbye and then BOOOOM! Somebody had been in their room and took almost everything of their stuff. Laptops, cellphones, all the new clothes bought at the trip, PASSPORTS and TICKETS.... Oh boy! Fuck! What an end of perfect 16 days! Really really shitty and galling! And the thing was, we noticed that at 11pm and they had to be at the LAX at 4am...sooo you know what that meant, huge stress and big chaos! We called the cops, they were really nice and tried to help us out as much as they could, we tried to reach somebody at the emergency lines of the german embassy, but as you might can believe, nobody was there, then we tried to get there personally, but no one there, next stop LAX with the attempt to get on the plane somehow even without passports. Well the only one who had luck was Magge cause he still had his passport, AnnSo and Josie were, lets call it, fucked! As it sould turn out they had to stay one more day in LA, get new passports, rent a motel room for another night without sleep, had to buy new flights for a lot of money and wasted a lot of time, nerves, energy and especially money. At least they are back home now and can already see the things from another point of view. But yeah I mean, what an end of 16 absolutely perfect days, but it shows that there are simply too many idiots in this world who can't accept the rules of a society and cause a lot of trouble for nice people. Anyways, that was the bad side of the trip, lets forget it and look back at a wonderful time and a great trip!

I am pretty good these days, we have beautiful weather, the only thing what keeps hunting me is the lack of sleep I had after the trip, so I fell asleep pretty early every night or almost at work. I went to the beach with Margareth and Karen this morning to ride the bikes from Marina del Rey to Santa Monica, it was really really cool to cruise in the morning sun, get some fresh ocean air and see some sick waves! There is a storm going on somewhere over the ocean and it causes some huge waves. So my plans to get into the water this weekend were crashed big time. But with a water temperature of 12 degrees it sucks anyways right now :-) Let's hope for some warmer surfing days out there again.

I hope you are all satisfied with this entry, I know I should have told you more about the trip but, I mean, you also could have get on a plane and join us, what about that?! :-)

See you soon fellas, 47 days to go till Germany, what the hack?!?!
Bye, Don