Babes and Beer |
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Drinking beer, being married, and raising kids.  A Nosuch affiliate. 
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Thursday, December 30, 2004
mmmmmm. I love red meat. For Christmas dinner, we had a rib roast. I follow Alton Brown's method of cooking, stick a digital thermometer in it, cook it at 250F until the internal temp is 120F, then let it sit 15 minutes while the oven heats up to 500F, then 10-15 minutes at 500F to get the perfect crust on the outside, and let it rest another 15 minutes after that. SO freakin' perfect.
Anyway, we had an 11lb rib roast, and there ended up being a lot of leftovers. I had rib roast for lunch on sunday, and for dinner on sunday (Harry had a fever and everyone else was going out to dinner so I stayed home with him and let B and Isabel go out to mexican), and for lunch on Monday and Tuesday. Last night we went to our friends house for dinner and they had a huge rib roast as well. Wooooo! I rule. Enough red meat to clog the widest arteries. Our other friends had their baby just fine on Tuesday, he was a second child and shot out like a watermelon seed. No word yet on the neighbors, they're not back yet. Their baby wasn't due for another month, so hopefully they're OK. Monday, December 27, 2004
Christmas eve was totally funny. It's been easily more than a decade, possibly two, since I've been in a car with guys tokin' out on hippy lettuce. Friday morning, with my not-brother-in-law and a brother-in-law, they got totally high on our way "shopping". All I had to do was mention Krispy Kreme to throw them into an agony of desire.
Personally, no matter how good THC is, I'm gonna wait until it becomes legal. Maybe that's never, so be it. Six bottles of wine were consumed over Christmas, I'm going to need to restock. Well.. now that I think of it, we had 72 bottles to start with, so even discounting the bottles of 3 buck chuck ($3 Charles Shaw from Trader Joes) I still have plenty. Goooooooood Christmas. My neighboors are due next month, but their water broke tonight. The parents of the 2 yr old girl B does daycare for also have been in labor all day. I may not be at work tomorrow, cuz B is their pseudo-Dula. BeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR! I love my drinking club. Err, "investing" club. Saturday, December 25, 2004
Christmas has been awesome.
I thought I knew most of my presents, since I came home early this month to a styrofoam cooler from Omaha Steaks, and B had my other main present sitting in her closet in plain sight, so when I tried to put a couple bags of toys for the kids in there I saw it. It was an awesome cordless combo kit, with a 19.2v cordless drill, a cordless 4.75" circular saw with laser guide, a light, two 19.2v batteries, and a 1hr quick charger. However, she came though in spades. I got a new Gerber multitool for my belt, sharp as hell I've already accidentally stabbed myself with it, the omnibus Patrick O'Brian "Aubrey-Maturin" boxed set, 5 hardback volumes, each with 4 of the books so it's the entire 20-book series in one set. These are the 18th century age-of-sail British Navy books that the "Master and Commander" movie the other year was based on. I also got a cool new digital bathroom scale that is accurate to within 0.2 lbs and also tells me my body fat percentage. I'm currently at 20.5% body fat, 201lbs for a 6'2" frame, which is slightly too fat, I should be down closer to 180 pounds and under 19% body fat. Maybe I'll set a goal of 15 or 16% body fat. B at 5'7" is a perfect 127lbs and 25% body fat, which is right in the middle of the normal range for a woman. Speaking of her weight, she's been worried lately, since she's shed 15 pounds in the past 3 months without trying to, she's down to a weight she hasn't been since college. She just needs to relax and eat more. The kids had a blast. Isabel got a new baby doll, a stroller/infant carrier/portacrib combo, at least a half dozen fancy dress-up princess dresses, and 4 more My Little Ponies. Harry got a few train sets, a set of sea creatures, a giant tonka firetruck, a big stegasaurus, just a bunch of crap. They both got more books and some Leappad software as well. Having B's family here has been a blast. Speaking of blasts, I shouldn't eat whole roasted garlic when I have guests. The smells coming out of my butt were truly unholy. Thursday, December 23, 2004
Crazy. Two of of the houses surrounding mine have christmas lights in their backyard. The one next door has lights in his backyard, but none in the front.
I biked to work on Tuesday, and got a call 10 minutes later from B, she was feeling dizzy and needed me to come watch the kids. It turns out it was just part of a migraine. My poor B. B's sister Annie is in town now with her little boy, and B's brother, his wife, and Annie's husband all arrive tonight. All her siblings will be together for christmas. I think the stress from that is what triggered the dizzyness on Tues. Annie's boy Brooks (his nickname is Boo, and if you call him Brooks he says "Not Brooks! Boo!") is annoying as heck. He's constantly whining, which is driving me crazy. Way more whining than my kids. I mean, I understand he's upset and in a strange place, but understanding doesn't mean it doesn't drive me crazy... Sunday, December 19, 2004
In preparation for going scuba diving sometime soon, I tried on the wetsuit that Laura dropped off. It's a really nice Farmer John styled one, nicer than any I'd worn before, which was rentals and a cheap used one. I didn't do much wetsuit diving, after about a dozen dives I'd bought a drysuit, which was SO much nicer, but for occasional dives, a wetsuit is fine.
Isabel saw me in the wetsuit, and got a gleam in her eye and say, "Go get Nemo Daddy!" Hee. Friday, December 17, 2004
Stupid media. I TiVo'ed the finale to The Apprentice last night, but didn't watch it because I was busy being schooled at poker. This morning, the first news headline to jump out included the name of the winner in the headline. No hiding spoilers for the news, I guess. I knew this was going to happen. Fortunately, if I'd really cared I'd have watched it last night.
Speaking of poker, I kept getting screwed on the river, usually by a King falling. One hand, i had 89s, and the flop was 910Ju. Cool, I've got a pair and four out of a straight. Not too shabby. Turn was a queen, giving me a straight! Woo! River, that pigfucker, was a king. Balls! That made for a higher straight on the table, and Corey had an ace, so I lost. Gah! Then, I was playing Omaha, and I had A5, and the flop was 234. Sweet, I've got a wheel, A-5 straight, which is the lowest possible low, it can't lose, and a decent high. Sure enough, the turn was a 5, and the river a 6. Higher straights galore, and a flush, so I don't get high, and two others had an ace and something from 2-5, giving them wheels as well, so the low half of the pot got split into 3. I won a whopping 1/6th of the pot, less than I put in. From what had flopped as a sure bet for half, and a good shot at the whole thing. It was a bad night. I should have cancelled poker and read, or watched Return of the King, or watched the Apprentice finale. Gah. I had lunch with Robin, one of my old student helpers yesterday. It was fun, I hadn't seen him in two years. His LiveJournal is linked on the sidebar. My friend Laura came over yesterday as well. (She's the 'LJ & her dogs' link on the sidebar). I haven't seen her in years. We worked together at the computer lab back when I'd just returned from the Gulf War, and she was a long time girlfriend of one of my friends, twice actually. She taught me to scuba dive back in 1993, and wanted to go diving again. Her main hobby these days is ice climbing, but the weather is not being conducive to climbable ice this year, so she wanted to go for a dive. I don't have a drysuit anymore, so she dropped off a new wetsuit she had left over from when she owned a dive store, and took my tanks off to have their 5yr hydro testing done. BRRRRRR, diving in Puget Sound in the winter in a wetsuit is gonna be cold, but we'll be going on a crab dive for tasty Dungeness crabs, which are large and taste awesome. My brother Kurt came over while Laura was there. 10 years ago when he was 15 she'd taught him to dive as well, and she hadn't seen him since. Heh. He had some photos of his house he'd gotten from the city archives, and man that house was WAY prettier back in 1920 when it was new. At some point in the 1950s, someone decided it was too "old fashioned" (aka pretty and nice) so they needed to "modernize" it. To do so, they chopped off all the eaves, replaced the cedar shake siding with asbestos tiles, removed the pretty columns from the porch and boxed it in, just made it into the hideous house it is today. I've been telling them to add eaves back when they need to re-roof, the old photo is just extra proof. Here is a link to some cool video. These guys were kayaking down a river, and while looking upstream waiting for their buddies, rocks were flying down, so one decided to video it, and the whole cliff upstream from them slumped into the river, damming it 30' high and stopping the river for 15 minutes. SUPER cool video. Joe Bob sez "check it out". Thursday, December 16, 2004
Ho! Watched the second half of the extended Two Towers last night. So freakin' good. I mean, the Wargs look CGI, and Faramir's character gets mistreated, but its SO freakin' good. The musical score is totally awesome. RrrrrRRRRrrrR!!!
I can't wait to view the extended Return of the King. Won't get a chance to tonight because of poker. I think I may just cheat and check who wins the Apprentice, since spoilers will be everywhere tomorrow anyway. At work the college has a free latte cart every december, each day it's at another of the three schools in the college. Of course, I just walk to each location so I get free hot chocolates each day. Funny how two hot chocolates can juice me up! Wednesday, December 15, 2004
I took the kids to Costco last night to pick up the Return of the King extended edition DVD, and was extremely happy to notice they have an offer, if you give them $3, they'll send you a slipcase for all 3 extended edition DVDs, just like if you'd waited and bought all 3 together. That's so awesome.
B and I watched the first disk of the Two Towers. Tonight we'll finish that up, and I guess starting on Friday we'll start RotK, unless poker doesn't happen tomorrow. Dunno when this will get posted, Blogger has been acting up. Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Heh. I'm terrible. Every time I read the kids a story about the birth of Christ, I have to add in a snide quote from Sam Kinison, where Joseph says "and you'd better be the ONLY son of God!"
Heh.
Ok, funny thought: Jason White got to vote for himself, since all past Heisman winners get a vote. I wonder if Archie Griffin, the only person to win it twice, gets two votes?
Speaking of college football, the UW hired Tyrone Willingham as our new coach. It'll be interesting to see how someone with such a reputation for integrity does here. Both his previous jobs (Stanford and Notre Dame) had much higher entrance requirements for players, so it doesn't surprise me that his players had good GPAs and graduation rates. We'll see how he does at UW, with junior college transfers and the general thuggery that has marked our football team over the past decade. While I really want a winning team, I am honestly sick of all the UW players up on criminal charges. Ty seems like the man to run a clean program, which will be a nice change of pace. I'm cautiously optomistic. We finished up Fellowship of the Ring last night. Good movie, I can't wait to aquire Return of the King extended edition at Costco tonight. Unfortunately I mis-timed our viewing, so I can't start watching it for a few days since we need to watch Two Towers again. For some reason telling Bridget that RotK extended edition has 50 more minutes doesn't excite her, she was sighing and saying "oh my god you have got to be kidding me! Is it all more battles or what?" heh, I told her it was 3 more endings to go with the 5 endings of the theatrical version... Sunday, December 12, 2004
Holy smokes! The Seahawks beat the Vikings, and the Rams lost again (because they can only beat the Hawks...) so the Hawks are back in the lead in their division. Crickey. What a joke. However, when the Hawks play well, they do do alright.
Last night B and I were just starting watching the Fellowship of the Ring extended edition DVDs (getting ready for Return of the King to be released on Tues, thank glub there isn't anything extra in the 12-dvd full set) when my brother came by. Our neighbor down the street was having a 30th birthday party and we were invited, so unfortunately I left B to watch the kids (grandma is out of town for 10 days) and went to the party with my brother. The neighbor is a mortgage broker, and he just turned 30. He owns two houses on this block, and the one he originally lived in got torn down to the studs in a renovation that added a second story and totally uberized the entire house. I mean, no expense was spared making this a brand new rendition of what houses here were like 80-100 years ago. Beautiful period trim, solid oak floors with real walnut detail work around the edges, just amazing. He also had some beer on tap that was quite tasty, a keg of Kona Brewing's Longboard Lager. Boy do I have some fond memories of that brewery when we went to Kona back in '99. He had a bar and pool table in his basement, with floors of stained and textured concrete. It's amazing how nice a concrete floor can be. We consumed quite a bit of beer and got our butts kicked by some guys who were really good at pool. My brother is good, but I just plain suck. Oh well, at least I'm good at poker. This morning I was blessed with no hangover, which since I'd had half a bottle of red wine and a glass of port for dinner and five pints of lager at the party was nice. B wanted to take the kids up to the Montlake Terrace pool, so we did and let them splash and swim and play for an hour. When I got home I speed-watched the TiVo'd Seahawks game, and was stunned that we managed to not choke at the end of the game. Wooo! Back to watching Fellowship of the Ring tonight. Saturday, December 11, 2004
Last night B and I watched the original 1965 "Flight of the Phoenix" with Jimmy Stewart because B had never seen it. After I saw that they were doing a remake of it (I'll never understand Hollywood) I set our TiVo to record it. It's a great movie, but like all older movies, its slow-paced compared to the post MTV style of movie making.
For the past few weeks, our fridge has been making some not-good grinding noises, for about 15 seconds every 3-5 minutes. Finally on Monday I had B call for service, since I'd tallked Best Buy into throwing in a 5 year service contract when we bought it 2 years ago. They were able to come out Wedsnesday, but by that time our freezer had stopped working for a day, then started working fine again. The guy came out and told us our compressor was shot (no shit Sherlock) and it'd take a few days to order a new one. Gah! I find it hard to believe they come to a 'fridge service call without a replacement compressor for said 'fridge. Sigh. Fortunately the service contract comes with a $200 food spoilage deal. We put what we could in my beer fridge, the chest freezer downstairs, and B's mom's fridge downstairs, but we still ended up tossing $190 worth of stuff. (Yes, we had to itemize it... Fortunately Safeway.com has a really nice fast search engine, making it less onerous than it could have been.) Friday, December 10, 2004
A week in review:
Last Friday, B's mom babysat while B and I went to a movie. We ended up seeing "National Treasure", a silly movie with tons of plot holes, but nothing really annoying so it was fun. Just what I expected. On Saturday we had our fancy-dress Christmas party. More guests than our Scotchtoberfest party, about 20, which was plenty for that oh-so-important critical party mass. I got very drunk, and as a result I was hung over most of Sunday. Sunday evening we went to a friends house, she was having a party for her hometown Pittsburg Steelers playing on sunday night football. The kids came too, they had a pretty good time. On Monday the Seahawks sucked ass against the Cowboys. No surprise there, but what a game. Second huge lead given up at the end of the game for Seattle this year alone, yet they're still in the playoffs. On Tues B went to her jazzercise, and I bathed the kids. These days it takes Harry over an hour to have a bath, he calmly plays until the water gets ice cold and his feet shrivel up. Crazy kid. On Weds not much happened. Last night I had poker, and through a combination of excellent cards and great play, turned my $20 buyin into $70. It was totally my night. That's always lots of fun. Been playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. (SW:KOTOR). It's a Star Wars adventure with the Neverwinter Nights 3rd edition D&D ruleset. Pretty fun, but you can totally see how it was designed for an Xbox. Friday, December 03, 2004
Ha! Ok, at home tonight Isabel was sitting on a chair, and looked a little strange. B picked up on it right away and asked "What are you doing Isabel? Why are you sucking your other thumb? Giving it a taste test?"
Sure enough, 15 seconds later Isabel pops that thumb out of her mouth, says "Yuck!", and puts her regularly sucked thumb in.
It was fun last night having poker with NotJeff. He was up from LA on a consulting gig. He has definitely improved his poker play, I'm proud of him. I ended up going way too far in hold'em with JJ down and a JK on the flop, making a set of jacks, but another player had a %&$ KK. Gah. Ended up down $28, over half from that one hand.
Wooo! My books from Amazon finally shipped and arrived. The post office only took 2 days. Too bad it took Amazon 10 days to ship something they claim "ships within 24 hours". Live and learn. My brother came over on Monday to help with the last of my christmas lights. None of those newfangled trendy icicle lights for me, that's what everyone has these days. Nope, nosirree, it's good old fashioned C9 colored bulbs for me. They look great, the whole house does, but I'm basically the only one on my block who bothers. Sigh. Thursday, December 02, 2004
Last night we loaded up the kids for a trip to the local family-run christmas tree lot. It still amazes me that they've owned this probably 1.5 acre lot in the middle of a neighborhood of $400k homes in the middle of Seattle for 50 years and just use it to sell xmas trees. Fun place however. We bought a nice 8' sheared douglas fir. B is really pleased with how nice this one is, apparently she didn't like last year's tree that much.
We also brought along our photo geek friend, he took a ton of pictures for us. I helped him get a tree as well, his russian girlfriend talked him into it, and since I have a truck, I can haul them without getting sap on his car. Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Heh, I never told Bridget that I wasn't drinking, so when I'd gotten home last night, B (who obviously reads my blog) commented "Am I in trouble for not noticing you weren't drinking?" Hee. No, I just thought that was funny. I thought it was funny when I blogged it, cuz I knew she didn't know or she'd have said something.
Speaking of not drinking, that fell by the wayside today at lunch. I met up with one of Observer's fellow peanut gallery hecklers, "Seattle Astronomer", for a fun lunch at Shultzy's sausage. They've moved down the street from where they were when I used to eat there, and they now have a large selection of fine German and European beers on tap. Following my rule to always encourage large beer glasses, since they offered a liter I took them up on it, a liter of Bitburger Pilsner. Yummy! SA and I had a great time mocking Observer, not that this is a difficult task. Highly amusing. It also maintains my streak of everyone I've ever met from the Internet was cool. Last night while B went to her jazzercise class I was at a loss for what to do with the kids, they didn't want to stay home and I didn't want to go to a mall, so I finally decided to take 'em downtown and ride on the carousel down at Westlake. They had a grand old time. Both were a little scared of the carousel, but after a while I'd talked them into it, and they LOVED it. Afterwards they didn't want to go home so we walked across the street to Westlake mall, up to the food court, and they had their first ice cream cones. Man where they excited about that. They love ice cream, but don't have it often. Harry was particularly funny, he would sit his on the table (the cone had a flat base) and just touch his tongue to it every 30 seconds or so. Crazy boy. After the ice cream we walked back to the garage and passed the Nordstrom "Santa picture" studio built onto the sidewalk. Both kids were excited to see Santa in the window, and since it was slow he waved at them, and a girl outside taking reservations gave them both a candy cane. Uff, it was almost bedtime. Fortunately I got them to stick the candy canes in their stockings to have "tomorrow", so that foisted that off onto B to deal with. They did NOT need candy to go with the ice cream right before bed. Uff-da. |
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