Babes and Beer |
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Drinking beer, being married, and raising kids.  A Nosuch affiliate. 
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Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Hook 'Em Horns! Ha ha! (In the manner of Nelson Muntz)
I loved that Holiday Bowl last night. Watchin' the Cougs shut down the supposedly unstoppable Texas offense was a lot of fun. Gee, I guess Mack Brown didn't watch the game tapes where the Cougs might blitz a time or two... It snowed last night, which is pretty cool. We don't get snow often, didn't get it at all last year. Only about an inch, and it's mostly melted now. The kids loved it. Tuesday, December 30, 2003
Gah. My stupid G4 (digital audio, 466Mhz) doesn't understand hard drives larger than 137Gb. Bah. Now I have to order a PCI card to use my new 250Gb disk. Ah well, the upside is the PCI card will be ATA133 instead of ATA66. The downside is spending another $49. Grrr.
I also figured out that the 30Gb boot disk I have been using for the past three years is a 5400rpm one, I had installed a 60Gb video storage disk a few years back, which is a 7200rpm, but never switched to booting from it. Sigh. Monday, December 29, 2003
Woooo! My cursed Seahawks made the playoffs for only the second time in 15 years. A 10-6 regular season record, with one of their losses due to admitted officiating error. They play next Sunday in Green Bay at frozen Lambeau field, should be a fun game.
We had a fun weekend. B decided we hadn't had turkey in too long so we had a turkey dinner on Saturday, yummy but it's really a lot of work. The kids have been having a blast playing with their new toys. Isabel dragged me to the living room to sit on the floor and have a tea party with her a bunch of times, with each set. Of course, now that she has tea sets, her idea of a tea party is to pull everything out, sort it carefully into sets, and not let anyone touch anything. Congrats to Jeff Schell for getting engaged after dating Jen for nine years. Saturday, December 27, 2003
Ok, watching the Hawai'i bowl come down to a sure win by Hawaii, then a stupid stupid coaching error gave Houston a minute to tie the score with a touchdown, and they did it, with Hawaii finally winning in 3 overtimes, was amazing.
Followed by the Insight Bowl last night, with Cal and VT taking it down to the wire with a tie score at 2 seconds left, and Cal putting the game in the hands of a field goal kicker who had missed his last 5, but he made the one that counted and gave them the win, amazing. Two straight bowl games with scores totalling over 100. Awesome. Thursday, December 25, 2003
It's been a great Christmas. Isabel got two tea sets, a play house, a set of 4 Disney princess shoes (stupid high heels...gah!), Pooh sweats, puzzles, and a large rubber crocodile. Harry got a rubber shark, some dinosaurs, blocks, more blocks, a garage set, and some stuffed animals.
I got a Canon A300 digital camera, the set of original Battlestar Galactica episodes on DVD, $45 in Barnes and Noble gift cards, and a big metal bucket full of beer, plus two bottles of booze. B got some lingerie, a 12v electric blanket for the car, and the really nice set of pots and pans she's been wanting. Oh yeah, the kids got Finding Nemo on DVD, they just finished watching it. Monday, December 22, 2003
Friday after work I watched Harry while B and Isabel raced down to the airport to pick up B's youngest sister Annie. She flew in from Spokane to spend the weekend with us since we won't be together for christmas. As soon as they got home B took advantage of the availability of babysitting to go to see a Sonics game that we'd gotten tickets to from a friend. She'd gotten 4 $95 seats (11th row behind the Sonics bench, pretty freakin' awesome seats) from a vendor. It was a lot of fun. Mind you, I don't like basketball, I am a complete fair-weather Sonics fan only paying any attention when they make the playoffs which hasn't been for 5 years or so anyway. Before Friday I couldn't name a single player now that Gary Payton is gone. (I could name the coach because he was a former player).
The game against the San Antonio Spurs, and was a lot of fun, even if we were down 25-9 shortly, and never caught up. They got creamed, but it's a lot more fun to watch in person from up close than it is to watch on TV. It's the third time I've ever been to a professional basketball game, and the first time I saw them play anyone besides the Minnesota Timberwolves. The last time I had floor seats in the second row right behind the visiting team, with menus under our seats we could order from and VIP parking. Those seats belonged to Jeff Ament, the bassist to Pearl Jam, who'd been dating my neighbor at the time. That ruled, I saw myself on the ESPN highlights afterwards. After the game we went to TS McHughs, a bar nearby. (I've always called them Tipsy McStaggers after the Simpsons). Our rule is, if you've got babysitting, might as well take advantage of it! I spent the day on Saturday shopping for christmas presents. I've gotten nearly everything taken care of, just need to find something special for B. Saturday night we had a big spiral ham dinner with all B's local relatives, mmmmm. After dinner on Saturday night I went out with two of my closest friends from high school. My one friend has asthma pretty bad and is allergic to brewers yeast (ugh! kill me now if that ever happens!) so we had to find a %*&$#( bar that doesn't allow smoking and serves hard liquor. Crickey, like I would have any f'ing idea. We were almost forced to (horrors!) go to Red Robin, a local "burgers and spirits" chain (shudder) but fortunately an internet search turned up McMennimans, an Oregon chain of brewpubs. Mmmm, real beer! We spent four hours drinking and laughing and suggesting hare-brained million-dollar idea schemes and shooting each other's schemes down. We did come up with a great patent suggestion, but I feel confident a patent search will turn up that it's already been done. At the end of the night my friend finally lets us know his wife is due in June with their second. We were giving him crap, "It took you four freakin' hours to tell us that?!?" He claimed the topic never came up. Dude, we talked about vasectomies for 5 minutes, that wasn't close enough?!? Crickey. Oh, I guess I'm gonna get snipped next month. I think I mentioned that before, but maybe not. We've pretty much decided to stick with the two we've got. On Sunday I watched my Seahawks play AWESOME the first half and stink up the place the second half, but it was enough to win, which makes them undefeated at home this year. We still need to win next week and get some help to make the playoffs, but the worst we can be is 9-7, and I'll take a winning record over the 8-8 we've been the past few seasons. Especially since the officials screwed the pooch in our game against Baltimore, giving the Ravens an extra minute to win the game. If we don't make the playoffs, it'll be the second time in 5 years we failed to make the playoffs due to an official making a terrible decision. Friday, December 19, 2003
Uff-da. Last night was my work holiday party, and I had 4 glasses of different red wines, and a beer. One of those wines did a hell of a number on my head. A few hours later, I had a skullsplitting headache, nausea, and dizziness. NOT the best condition to try and read Dr Seuss books to my daughter.
If I got migraines, I'd guess that would be what they were like. Fortunately, I feel fine today. Thursday, December 18, 2003
Ok, that utterly ruled.
Tuesday morning I got up early and caught the shuttle flight to Spokane. I was hoping to get bumped a few hours so I could get a free flight out of the deal, but some loser didn't show up so I got a seat anyway. Ah well. It's a 55 minute flight on a tiny puddle jumper, landed at 8am. Walking through Spokane's "international airport" (they must have a scheduled flight to canada or something) I laugh at how much larger it is now than it was 20 years ago when I was a teenager. Back then there were 4 gates, red blue yellow and green. At least they always had jetways, unlike Cabo or San Jose where you walk outside and up a set of stairs to get on the plane. As an aside, back in high school we'd drive all the way out to the airport to buy cans of Coke from the pop machine there for a buck and a quarter. We'd laughingly say, "Hey, this is the most expensive coke anywhere, it has to be the best!" We ran that joke way too far into the ground. Anyway, I caught the bus to town since my friend was already at the theater. The next stop after the airport was a work-release facility. By the time we got downtown (8:45am), I noticed that I was the only one on the bus who didn't reek of cigarette smoke. When you don't work around smokers, you tend to forget how many there are. Walking through the streets of downtown spokane at 8:45 in the morning on a weekday, I was a little freaked out. It was like a ghosttown. Zero vehicle traffic. Zero pedestrians. I mean, what the hell?!? It was surreal. You NEVER see that in Seattle, not at 4am, certainly not during the workday. Bizarre. I got to the downtown mall where the AMC 20 theater was, and met my friend Nate who had secured a ticket for me. We went up a bunch of escalators to get there, and they'd stuck us in the largest top theater. They had opened the theater up for seating at 8am, and gave everyone necklace passes so we could come and go as we pleased. Apparently when they first let people into the theater, they dimmed the lights and started playing christmas music. People started raising hell, and the projectionist stuck her head out the window and said, "What's the matter?" They yelled back to turn the music off before people go insane, and turn the lights back on people were reading. The theater complied. The theater did awesome job with the whole experience. They let us take basically anything in, the only rule was no glass bottles. Popcorn and pop had free refills all day long. Hotdogs, pretzels, and nachoes were $1 each. They provided free pizza for 400 between the second and third movies. They went well above and beyond the call of duty. Nate had gotten us some excellent seats, they were the front row of the last section with a 6' walkway right in front of us, so we had tons of legroom. I'd brought a small pillow just in case, and ended up the seats were extra comfy so I only used it for lumbar support for extra slouchiness. After we'd been seated for a while the rest of Nate's co-workers showed up so we went for a walk. Not much to see in the mall, but a-ha! There was a nice bar there. It was 11:30am, but they were open so we went in, ordered some calimari and drinks. I had a snort of 12 yr old Maccallans, and Nate had a cold glass of Ketel One vodka. They only had a short pour of that left, so to make it up they gave him a short pour of a new (to us at least) Estonia vodka called Turi. It was spectacular. It tastes like mountain fresh spring water, glorious. It was soon time for the extended Fellowship. I refilled my popcorn and drink (I'd had one earlier) and was very pleased, they didn't show any trailers or ads or anything, just the feature presentation. Nice touch! What a great movie, and a great soundtrack. Peter Jackson was very thoughtful to include great pee breaks whenever elves are talking to each other or Arwen and Aragorn talk to each other. As soon as it was over, it was after 4pm, and we had an hour, so we immediately jetted down to the bar again for more drinks and happy hour appetizers. We were joined by only a few other movie patrons, so we put a few tables together to talk. Funny to find some of the others were also from Seattle having been screwed by the Cinerama. We figured out we were having a much better time here than we would have there, since the Cinerama would have had us waiting outside until an hour before the first movie, and there was nowhere to go there, no bar or food court... I refilled my drink and popcorn again. I sorta had a goal of eating 4 bags of popcorn, but I failed in that, only eating 3. Still, that's enough salt to kill a rhino. Uff-da. Extended Two Towers was totally awesome. After that I stopped drinking anything so I wouldn't have to pee during RotK. The pizza was tasty. Return of the King was amazing. Afterwards we went back to Nate's place to crash. Uff. I flew back the next morning. Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Ho! Here it is, 4:50am, and I'm already awake, getting ready to fly to Spokane to see a movie. Heh. The scary part it, as geeky as I am, I'll likely be one of the most normal people there.
Mmmm, chock full of Lord of the Rings goodness. My goal is to eat 4 large buckets of popcorn today. Oh, and my secondary goal is to survive the experience. Monday, December 15, 2003
On Saturday we had our formal-dress christmas party. I love having an excuse to put on my tux, and B took an old bridesmaid dress she had that was ankle-length and chopped it to knee length, it looked good. She's happy to be able to wear a dress from 5 years ago after having two kids, and she looked hot in the seamed stockings. Mmmm.
Anyway, we had a great time. The turnout was better than expected, about 20 people, plenty enough to reach critical party mass. Amazingly, with our party starting at 7:30pm we were able to get prepared far enough in advance that we showed up to a friend's holiday party from 5pm to 6pm. Just our luck that the only other party we're invited to all month is at the same time as ours. Ah well. Saturday, December 13, 2003
Wooo! I mentioned two months ago how I got boned getting tickets to see the Lord of the Rings trilogy at Paul Allen's Cinerama, but just yesterday I managed to get a ticket to the showing in Spokane where my oldest friend (who introducted me to LotR in 5th grade) is going as well. I'll fly in Tues morning, watch Fellowship Extended, Two Towers Extended, and then Return of the King, sleep, then fly home Wed morning. OOOOOOooOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
Too bad theaters in Washington state don't serve beer, and airlines won't let me fly with my flask. Friday, December 12, 2003
Last night when I was reading Isabel a story, I did what I often do, stopping the story to point out something in the picture and ask her what it is. Last night she responded with, "Stop doing that Daddy!" I laughed my ass off.
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Ok, this morning I had Apple Jacks for breakfast. Not just ordinary Apple Jacks, these were super new improved Apple Jacks, with Blue Carrots in them! Yawn. The funny part is the disclamer on the front of the box: No carrot taste. No apple taste. Same old 'jacks taste.
I didn't for a second think the blue carrots tasted like carrot, but I guess I never knew there wasn't any apple taste to apple jacks. We bought a christmas tree last night, with all of us putting on santa hats to visit the same christmas tree lot nearby we always go to. A farm has owned that lot for over 50 years, back when that part of town was still farm, and now it's a huge empty lot in the midst of a residential neighborhood where 4000sqft lots of 2 bed 1 bath homes go for $300k. I love family ownership, it'll suck when they eventually sell out to a huge apartment building. Monday, December 08, 2003
I'm back! We had an awesome time, it was around 85F and sunny every day down there. I caught a 7' 150lb striped marlin, the kids went into the hotel pool at least twice a day, and Isabel was yelling on the ride home from the airport last night, "I don't wanna go home, I want to go to Cabo!!" |
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