Babes and Beer |
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Drinking beer, being married, and raising kids.  A Nosuch affiliate. 
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Monday, September 30, 2002
I had a fun weekend. Bridget was doing so well that I was able to have her sister come over to help watch the kids Saturday afternoon while I went to the Husky football game with her sister's boyfriend Bill. They own a house together but aren't married, so I call him "Not-Brother-in-Law Bill".
On Saturday night we went to a friend's 30th birthday party, it was a good time. We brought both of the kids, and after letting Isabel charm people for an hour we put her to bed in their crib, and another hour later Harry had his last meal and fell asleep on their bed, so we were able to stay until 11pm. Isabel was adorable when I got her up to take her to the car, all sleepy-faced yet waving Hi to everybody in her pink footie jammies. Isabel is getting good at saying lots of words, as long as they are two syllables or less. We got her to say "Happy Day 'Caela" (one at a time) for Micaela. Yesterday I had to help Not-Brother-in-Law Bill pick up a table for their kitchen, and we went to the mall with the kids. A saleswoman in the baby section of Penney's gave Isabel a pair of rubber duckies for being so good. As we were leaving Isabel kept signing "please" for more duckies, and looking back for the lady. It was pretty funny. I could not believe the Seahawks were scoring like they were yesterday. Crickey, if they could do that once in a while they'd be better than 1-3. Friday, September 27, 2002
B's surgery went really well. It only took a few minutes to find the IUD right behind the uterus, and the doc says everything in there looked great. Two tiny incisions, one inside her bellybutton, one just outside, covered with bandaids. Whew.
The babies behaved well for me. Thursday, September 26, 2002
Had a good time playing poker last night, won $15, mostly on the very last hand of the night. Interestingly, about an hour before that every player was almost exactly broken even, a very strange event.
I didn't have to worry about missing The West Wing, my AT&TiVo caught it for me. I get to watch it at my leisure. Gah, I need to come up with a vacation for my anniversary. Each year we go on a weekend getaway to celebrate, and each year we alternate the planning and keep it a secret. Last year we went to Lopez Island up in the San Juans, the year before we went to Vancouver, BC, eh. Even if I come up with it, I can't tell you guys cuz B reads my blog. :) I need to remember to move all my files off iTools before it's closed on Monday. Also to get some html up to host my baby movies. I guess the good thing is now I can host huge-ass hundred megabyte movies and not care about storage or bandwidth, just the download time people are saddled with. Gotta love having a 100Mbit fat pipe and a fast Mac. After 5 years, distributed.net's rc5-64 contest is over. It's been over since July but they didn't notice. Gah! My group, the United States Whiskey Corps, did alright, but we didn't win $1000 to spend on single malt whiskey. Wednesday, September 25, 2002
Ever have that "not so fresh" feeling? Ugga. My neighbor brought over a half-gallon growler (see definition #3) filled with Big Horn Oktoberfest. Damn tasty, but beer in a jug doesn't last, so it had to be consumed, and I didn't have anyone nearby handy to help me, so I had to throw myself upon the task so I wouldn't risk alcohol abuse. I'd already had a bottle of Bridgeport IPA. Uff. I woke up at 3:30 feeling like I was gonna hurl, so I had so alka-seltzer and stayed up for an hour, and felt mostly less bad. Waking up this morning I feel a hell of a lot better than the middle of the night, but a hell of a lot worse than normal. Ugga.
Have I ever mentioned how much I hate Ikea? Five years ago when they first arrived it was cool and cheap and neat, now I dread going there, I don't want most of the crap they sell, and I don't know what really changed. Maybe they're only for people in their 20s. I dunno. I'm still pissed at them for not selling their Billy bookshelves in faux oak anymore, so I can't get a third booze cabinet to match the two I have. Someday I'll break down and buy a different color, and put the new one between the two old ones like I meant for them to be different colors. Gah. We bought this cute little mini table and two chairs for Isabel there, but the table didn't contain all the proper hardware to attach all four legs, just enough for three legs. That sapped my will to live, let me tell you. Fortunately B called them up and they are going to send us the part. No %&$*$ way was I going to drive a half hour south through traffic back to Ikea. Tuesday, September 24, 2002
I finally renewed my Clan Lord account, I haven't played since before I left for vacation, so I had a month's worth of library ranks to spend. I got 20 more ranks in Gossamer, taking me to 50 ranks, and spent the rest on Evus. It's sorta a pain that you can't quick-train any of the "self-taught" Goss ranks like you can ranks from normal trainers, so I had to wait 90 seconds per rank, times 20 ranks, or a half an hour. Booooring.
For our monday night football gathering last night my friend Chuck picked up some hotdogs and cans of chili and we had chilidogs, plus a few pounds of tater tots. The game was pretty boring until the 4th quarter, then it livened up some. The halftime footage of the '87 MNF game with Oakland at Seattle sucked. Gah, yeah, yeah, Boz sucked ass and Bo knows Football, but do we have to watch the Ghost of Seahawks Past show replays of abysmal defensive reaction to Bo Jackson? Gaaaa!!! My poor NFL franchise is definitely cursed. Off to a whopping 0-3 start. Some stupid pigfucker left an old ironing board leaning up against one of my trees in front. %&$*$!!! Now what the hell am I supposed to do with it? Friday is going to suck. Bridget had an IUD inserted a few months back so that we wouldn't have baby #3, but then she couldn't find the little indicator string, so she went to her doctor. The doc couldn't find it either, so she got sent for an ultrasound. The radiologist thinks that it is *behind* her uterus. Gahhh!! How the hell can that even happen? Sigh. Anyway, now she has to have laproscopic surgery so they can try to find and remove it. She needs to be at the hospital at 6:30am, and she'll be knocked out. Worst of all I don't get to be there with her at all, I will be watching the kids at home. Harry is going to freak out when I have to feed him bottles all day instead of his vastly preferred method of food delivery, the boob. Currenty I try to give him a bottle a day, he screams and yells for 15 minutes each time in protest. "Hey!?! What the hell are you trying to pull?!? I wasn't born YESTERDAY, sheesh! Knock this bottle crap off, gimme the boob! NOW!" Needless to say, Friday is going to be a looooong stressful day. Monday, September 23, 2002
I had a great time going to my first Husky home game of the season. It was a rare night game at Husky Stadium, and with clear dark skies and a full moon rising over Lake Washington, it was awesome. The game itself was pretty fun, basically a scrimmage against Wyoming. We won 38-7. One the plus side, our QB threw for 404 yards, two touchdowns, and zero interceptions, we had eight sacks, and until a stupid moment in the last few minutes we had zero penalties. One the minus side, we weren't able to get much of a running game going, and we committed 4 fumbles. Wyoming fumbled three times themselves, but they recovered all seven fumbles. Bah. No punts on our side either, we either scored, fumbled, or the time ran out.
On Saturday Bridget went to help a pregnant friend figure out what to register for her baby shower, and took Harry with her. I took Isabel to the zoo, we had a grand time. She got to see sheep and goats and pigs and cows and horses at the petting zoo, which was very exciting to her because she'd knew what they were. We also saw gorillas and lions and orangutans, she was very excited seeing monkies since her current favorite book is "Curious George". She's very sweet. Harry is taking to solid food with a will, he eats a quarter cup of rice cereal twice a day, chomping it down WAY better than Isabel did. Friday, September 20, 2002
Strange to be back at work after taking three weeks off. At least a shiny new dual 1Ghz G4 was waiting for me! :)
Isabel gave me a big smootch when I woke her up from her nap yesterday, normally she just gives me a big hug and pats my back a few times. Very sweet. Harry is getting huge. He's 4 months old and weighs 20lbs. He's getting personality too. WOoo! Tomorrow is my first Husky home game. I missed the game two weeks ago for a six-brother reunion in eastern WA and last week was a bye week. We're playing Wyoming who are 0-3, so it doesn't seem to be much of a threat. The game is at 7pm, a rare night game. Wednesday, September 18, 2002
Well, my brother Lance is gone, he'll be in Germany for the next year. We did manage to finish Baldur's Gate II, something we'd been talking about for five years (well, the original plan was the original BG).
On Saturday, after watching a few football games, a buddy and I loaded up in my truck with a couple of coolers of beer, no food, some sleeping bags, and tickets to see Rush at the Gorge outdoor amphitheater outside George, WA. We stopped in Issaquah to meet up with another friend, two hours down I90 later and we stopped off at the nearby Frenchman's Coulee, a cool canyon with lots of rock cliffs and rock climbers, to meet up with my brother Steve and his wife. We then convoyed to the campground at the Gorge (freakin' $35 for what is really just a parking lot) and began to drink some beers before walking over to the show. The weather was awesome, and the Columbia River gorge in the background was pretty freakin' awesome. Apparently there had been a shooting after a rap concert earlier in the year so the campground now had a "strict" no-alcohol rule. Everyone I saw was either drinking out of a keg cup or smokin' hippy lettuce. At one checkpoint a security dude asked a guy, "Hey, that's not beer in that cup is it?" and the guy replied with a big grin, "Nope, this here's ginger ale. I have an upset stomach". heh. Beer bottles and cans were everywhere near the garbage cans. The security was amazingly light. I was merely asked if I had a weapons or alcohol. My brother was carrying a large plastic bag with sweaters and a blanket in it, and when asked he told them it was a huge bundle of dope he was planning on selling. It was nearly the lightest security I had ever seen at a concert. My first impression of the crowd was that it was by far the least attractive audience I had ever seen. Wierd, though. Lots of Rush fans are geeks, sure, but there were guys who looked like mid-50s upper-management businessmen, and right behind us were three women who looked like they were mid-40s upper-class housewifes who drove their Volvo to the show straight from the beauty parlor... Freaky. The show itself was awesome. This was my sixth Rush concert. They've been my favorite band for more than 20 years now, and after I saw them live the first time I knew I could die happy. The Gorge had two beer gardens, one right below us near the reserved seating, and one all the way over on the other side. Turns out the one below us was reserved for "box seat season pass holders", bah. The other one was freakin' crazy, it was a "Camel Cigarettes Cazbah", sorta fake Turkish themed bar, but to get in, you had to fill out a Camel survey form. "Do you smoke? Nope. Do you have email? Nope", Crickey, and we had to show ID 3 seperate times. All that to pay $8 for a 24oz tallboy can of Coors Lite. (shudder) Coors Lite was my high school official beer, "Loaded Not Bloated". It's a wonder anybody can get drunk off it, it tastes like refreshing spring water to me. After the show we went back to the parking lot, err, I mean "campground" to drink some more. We had quite a bit of beer, but the five of us soon demolished all that we'd brought, and since it was now 2am and "quiet time", we figured it was time to turn in. The guards who came by to announce "quiet time" were staggering around, apparently drunker than we were. The next morning we woke up at 8am feeling "not so fresh". My one friend had gone to Trader Joes and had some curry nan, some salami, and some mozzerella cheese balls, but oh lordy that does NOT make for a good breakfast on a queasy stomach. Blargh. I found a can of pringles in the truck from one of my earlier weekends and ate that instead, plus gatoraid and my sweet precious life-saving alka-seltzer. By 9am my buddy and I hit the road, heading south. Without a map, I am pretty sure we picked a fairly boondoggled route, but by 11am we'd hit Oregon, and started heading west along I84 towards Portland. With a quick stop at the Bonneville Dam to visit Larry, an 11 foot long, 800 pound sturgeon who turned 100 years old this year (stugeon have growth rings on their scales) we arrived in Portland around 2:30pm. After driving around for a bit we found the Bridgeport brewery, where we settled in with some suds and pizza to watch football and kill a few hours. By this time I was feeling pretty darn good, and it was 6pm so we headed over to the Rose Quarter. We found free parking about five blocks from the Rose Garden, right on some main road that led to the freeway onramp. Sweet! We wandered around the crowd outside the Rose Garden, and just as we were passing by a security guy announced to this huge line that the other doors would open too and they could have lines too, so we ended up first in our line, just as they opened the place. I went to the nearest beer garden, $5.50 for a 16oz Widmer Hefewisen is a MUCH better deal, while my buddy went to look for a white tour tshirt in XL. ($30 for a tshirt, not good of course, but not as bad as I was expecting). A few beers later my edge was off, and in we went. Whoa! My seats were pretty kick-ass! We were three rows up along the side, about halfway back, but crickey, that place is designed for basketball so the floor is pretty tiny, we were MUCH closer than at the Gorge. Pretty cool. I got groped by this drunk or stoned slightly used-up looking 35 year old chick in our aisle every time she went past us, but she was doing that to every guy around, I'm sure the guy she was with was proud. This was my seventh Rush show, and for some reason I was SO totally into it. I think the night before had me totally fired up or something. RrrrrrrRRRRrrrrrrrRRrrrrr! (imagine my arms pumping up and down like Beavis). Wooooo! Rush! Wooooo! Since the set list was the same, we bagged out about 30 seconds before the end of the last song, walked the five blocks to the truck, and were on the freeway and heading home by 11pm. We pulled into Seattle by 1:30am, and after a quick shower I was asleep by 2am. It's been five years since Rush had been on tour. Hopefully this won't be their last tour. Monday, September 16, 2002
Vacation almost done, Baldur's Gate II almost solved, I'll be back to blogging on Weds.
This morning I was feeding Isabel and saw a flash of light outside, looked up and heard a noise like a gunshot, and saw a crow falling from the sky to hit the street. The crow had fried itself on the electrical transformer on the utility pole, and now power is out down the block. Fortunately for me we're using the upstream transformer but a bunch of neighbors are out of power. Monday, September 02, 2002
Oh boo hoo hoo.
Oh boo hoo HOOO hoo hoo. My poor Huskies lost due to a last second field goal, set up by our own stupid mistake of having 12 men on the field for the last play. Waaaa! It was a great game up until then, and I am still pretty happy with our performance against a powerhouse like Michigan in front of 111,500 people. Uff-da. Man oh man am I tired. Burning the candle at both ends for days on end. Need a vacation from this vacation. |
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