Babes and Beer |
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Drinking beer, being married, and raising kids.  A Nosuch affiliate. 
Family Pictures Active blogs: Carpe Datum Cognitive Dissonance Dubious Quality Joe Delta Fishpimp A Clan Lord Journal Fun Turns to Tragedy! A Stitch In Time Free Market Fairy Tales Timmerov LJ & her dog The Phone Booth Chuck Pierce T-Homo The Brad Hole Greg Costikyan Phil Steinmeyer Ty Robin Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools Mostly inactive blogs: WOPR Spring Tide The Tangential Jeff Schell Clan Lord blogs: Fierce and Furry: The Adventures of Hor |
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Cabo! Tomorrow morning B, myself, the kids, and B's mom fly down to Cabo San Lucas with some friends for a much-needed week of vacation. A good time will be had by me. Thursday, April 20, 2006
Last night was pretty funny. Waaaay back in 1988, I was an undergrad at UW. A friend found out about these crazy "internships" at Microsoft doing tech support over the phone. I applied and after an easy interview was accepted. This was back when Microsoft was entirely in six buildings in Redmond, but they were planning new construction. After six weeks, we got moved into Lincoln Plaza, a building just outside downtown Bellevue which was being leased, but almost all of microsoft's Product Support Services fit. Free tech support, but it was a local Seattle number, so you had to pay the long distance yourself. The Mac group was part of one floor, I seem to remember we were about 30 people then. About half the people were "intern" college students, and the rest were mixed temps and full-time employees. I was there for six months (fall '88, winter '89), then back to school for a quarter (spring '89), then six more months at Microsoft (summer-fall '89.) We got paid $8/hr the first quarter, $9 the second and $10 after that. It seemed like huge money at the time. It was a fun and crazy place. Lots of hijinks, (I mean you get a bunch of 19 year olds together with nearly no supervision and shit happens) Last night one of the women fulltimers who worked there held a little reunion. I'd gotten the invite the day before forwarded from a friend who'd worked there that I hadn't seen in over 10 years, and sent it on to the friends I still had addresses for who I'd worked with. Only one of them was local and able to make it, so I picked him up and we drove out to Issaquah to the restaurant where the reunion was held. I had a great time talking to my friend, last time I'd seen him was about 7 years ago when he opened a new office for his business. (He was still running a modified version of the consulting company we'd founded at lunch at Microsoft). When we got there, we recognized a few people, but almost noone remembered us. Most of the people there were either full-timers, or a ton came in the early 90s, after we'd left. Sigh, a bunch of the interns who just stayed on and never got their degrees were retired now. How was I supposed to know that being responsible and finishing up my degree wouldn't pay off as much? Eh, I have no real regrets, but with 20/20 hindsight I'd have stayed there. The early 90s was a lucrative time at Microsoft. It was great seeing my two friends, and funny seeing my little brother in a memory book from a year after I'd left, he'd done the same internship. Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Crickey. Isabel has gotten to the age where she loves to tell jokes. She doesn't know what's funny or not yet, but she tries. Isabel: "Daddy, why was six afraid of seven?" Me: (um, because seven eight nine?) "Why?" Isabel: "Because seven eight nine! HAhaahhahaha" Me: Laughs. Isabel: "Daddy, why was eight afraid of 10?" Me: (oh lordy) "Why?" Isabel: "Because 4 5 6! Hahahahahahahah" and a shit ton of non-sequitur knock-knock jokes. Knock knock. Who's there. Gorilla. Gorilla who? Gorilla ocelot! hahahahahahah! etc. Last night during dinner Harry finished early and wandered off to go play outside, since we had about the best weather this year. He put on his mud boots since we've got a mud bog in the back corner of the yard where water seeps from uphill, but he forgot to take them off when he came in to wash up. There was mud tracked EVERYWHERE. Isabel said, "What the lord did you DO, Harry?!?". Monday, April 17, 2006
Saturday, after spending some time recovering from my cognac-induced hangover, I drove back out to the lake and continued wiring my parent's basement. (Legally they can't have a basement, so it's 1700 square feet of 8' ceiling crawl space.) We wired up 7 recessed can lights in the ceiling, which between me arriving late, a 2 hour trip to Home Depot (the nearest one is a 30 minute drive), and trying to track down a tripped GFCI outlet (I ended up finding *two* tripped GFCI outlets, my dad was like "oh that's why those outlets on that side of the house don't work." GAH!) was all I got accomplished. When I was at Home Depot, I saw something totally awesome. It was a semi-portable sauna, needs no plumbing, just plugs into a 110v outlet. They had a 2-person one on sale for $1999. Now, I don't *have* two grand, man oh man would I love to have a sauna. I used my folk's one again, I just love having that heat cook the flesh off my bones. I don't buy all their health claims that it rejuvenates the skin and burns as many calories as jogging, but damn it sure feels nice. Maybe it's my Scandahoovian heritage, I'm a quarter Finn and sauna is a national pastime there. (Oh and drinking vodka) I've only ever used the hot-rocks and steam saunas, never a IR "dry" sauna like that box, but if it feels like sitting in the sun without UV, maybe it's nice. I'd need to try one before I shelled out that kind of money. Saturday night B's aunt and cousin came over, and the major topic of conversation was the "passion party" that her cousin went to. I was dyin' laughing when B's mom was asking what the heck anal beads where, how they are used, and why. It appears that both sides of my family are wacky. Sunday morning the kids had their 12th easter egg hunt of the past few weeks, then we went out to my folk's lake place. My two older brothers and their families came as well. My mom set up an all-ages egg hunt. Each kid got to find 3 of each color solid egg, and each adult got to find 4 mixed-color eggs. The adult eggs had numbers in them, and in mom's bedroom was a row of beers with the corresponding numbers. I got a Kokanee, a bottle of champagne (actual champagne, not Miller Lowlife, the 'champagne' of beers), a wolaver's oatmeal stout, and an Alaskan Smoked Porter 2005. Mmmm! I also got B's beers, which was a Rogue Dead Guy Ale and *three* bottles of Moose Drool. The kids got candy and money and crap. The meal was awesome, ham and pork loin and beef tenderloin and tons of sides. A great time. The drive home kinda sucked. It was late, and when we picked up B's mom, she was all shaky again, barely able to move with her walker. When we got home at 10:30pm and put the kids to bed, she couldn't even get out of the car. B and I could have carried her, but she freaked out every time we tried. B had to take her to the ER again. Sigh. B came home at 3am, and was VERY happy. This time the ER docs figured out that she was low on potassium and sodium, and gave her an IV, and half an hour later she was up and moving again. Gah! Why couldn't they have figured that out last time? Apparently her blood pressure meds were fucking up her electrolytes. Saturday, April 15, 2006
Thursday after work we drove to Spokane. Harry was all excited as we were leaving, he thought we were finally going to Cabo, but that's next week. Friday I got up at 5:40am and spent an hour driving out to my parent's beautiful log lake house. My Dad needed me to wire up lights and outlets in 3 rooms he'd roughed-in in his basement so he could continue working on them. I have no idea how he can be so competent at so many things yet electrical kicks his ass. Nine hard hours of labor later the new circuit was installed, tested, and done. B spent the day at her sister's house with the kids. Apparently they had a birthday party for my 1 year old neice. As I drove back into town, I listened to a high school friend's radio show, the Boom Boom Variety Hour (and a half). He played 98% weird japanese "music" that sounded like someone having an epileptic fit on a synthesizer. Bizarre. I went to my brother's house, he started calling my friend up at the radio station and putting in weird requests "Freebird, man!" but my friend knew it was us. After the radio show ended at 8pm my brother and I met up with my friend, got some beer, went downtown, got a great pizza at Mootzies, and went to my friend's new shop that he is opening up with friends in a few weeks. It is on Monroe just north of the bridge in the same place a used record store was for 30 years until the lady who ran it decided to retire at 80. They're going to be selling lots of crap. Vintage bicycles, art books about cars and pinups, strange music, car parts, anything collectible. I can't wait to see what the store looks like when they're done. Huge friggin' space, 1200 square feet and more than that in Silence of the Lambs basement, for $700/month. Damn rents are cheap in Spokane. Speaking of that basement, the foundation of this building is so old it's local rocks piled up and set with cement. Apparently that was a popular building method in Spokane before 1900. One of the front window panes had been recently busted, but the second pane was fine, so at midnight my friend's shop partner was in the street with a broom and a trash can and a pair of pliers taking out the busted glass pane so the place wouldn't look ghetto. Someone called the cops saying there was a burglary, but the cop who showed up took one look and said "Um, I don't think burglars normally clean up after themselves" plus there wasn't anything there to steal. Meanwhile I was taking on all comers at the 1984 Karate Champ arcade game they had set up. Just run up and kick 'em in the nuts was my main strategy. "Half Point!". Fun game. That was back in the day when there were just 25 moves you could make. (Two joysticks, each could be up/down/left/right/centered). When we eventually got back to my brother's place at like 2am, he decided we needed friggin' cognac to make the night complete. Ugga. Now it's 8:30am, I'm hung like a crippled french monkey, and I need to get back to the lake to finish up some more wiring projects. At least my brother has wireless network so I'm able to blog. Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Holy smokes. Ok, so today I saw that only 14 pizza joints in the country are certified by Verace Pizza Napoletana, an Italian pizza certification place, whatever that is worth. Two of them were Tutta Bella, a two-store chain in Seattle. I absolutely love a good pizza, so I told B to not bother cooking dinner, we were going out for pizza. She's a huge pizza margherite fan, so I knew she'd be on board. We went to the one on the corner of 43rd and Stone Way. They only opened in December, which I would have known about if Sidewalk.com hadn't been bought out by Shittysearch.com. Man Sidewalk.com was awesome. Citysearch is without worth. Anyway, we drove over there, they had lots of parking at 5:30 on a Tuesday. My first impression is it was huge. I was expecting a little hole in the wall, not a giant place. It was easily 4-5 times bigger than I expected, with probably over 20 employees. It wasn't very full when we got there, but it filled up fast, and it's a friggin' Tuesday. After they seated us they gave the kids these colored wax sticks that bent and stuck together and unstuck, a pretty cool toy. Isabel made a cool sculpture, and Harry made a wad. They asked if the kids wanted some pizza dough, and brough them each a tennis-ball sized lump of raw dough. Harry loved it, pounding on it and missing his mini rolling pin B bought him for play-dough. Eventually both kids turned their dough into gooey balls and had bits of dough stuck all over their hands, requiring handwashing. I had two pints of their draft Italian beer, "Moretti". It was a nice lager, nothing spectacular but I like to have a local beer with cuisine. The pizzas were awesome. Fishpimp, NotMe, WOPR, any other Seattle readers, you should all go here post-haste. We'll be back. B got a pizza margherite, I had their #11, Bianca (Extra virgin olive oil, roasted garlic, oregano, roasted onions, formaggi della casa, goat cheese). Holy crap it was so friggin' good. The onions were carmelized to perfection, something I've never seen any other pizza place accomplish. The crust was wafer thin and had just the exact right amount of char. This is easily the second best pizza I've ever had. (Totono's on Coney Island takes the prize.) Isabel said it was the best pizza she'd ever had. We'd gotten them a bambino's pizza with cheese and sausage. Harry couldn't get his mouth working fast enough, he hoovered down 4 slices. Tutta Bella, 43rd and Stone Way. A great dining experience.
First off, my mother-in-law is doing much better, at home and getting along mostly fine, still using her walker (aka Old Lady Cruiser(tm), in flame red no less) most of the time. Thanks for the kind words. Sunday was my 38th birthday. I had a party on Saturday night where I cooked up 15lbs of baby back ribs Alton Brown style. They turned out OK, I think I'll revert to Emeril's method next time. WOPR claimed he didn't know what kind of party it would be so he brought a bottle of MD 20/20 in Grape flavor. We each had a few snorts, and for punishment I'm not allowing him to drink any beer at my house on poker nights until we kill that bottle. Ugh. It tastes like kool aid and nasty. Blargh. We spent hours on Saturday listening to Comcast channel 911, "Arena Rock". I was laughing my ass off all the time. I give them props for picking many 2nd tier songs from bands, playing "Who Made Who" instead of "You Shook Me All Night Long", and "Big Money" instead of "Tom Sawyer". B thought she'd hate it but ended up loving it. Isabel spent at least an hour dancing to it. I was laughing. Woooo, go butt rock! Sunday, my actual birthday, was incredibly lazy. I never ended up getting dressed all day, sleeping in until 9:20am, probably a record for the past year, reading, playing World of Warcraft for hours, just doing nothing. Great day. Saturday, April 08, 2006
Well, my mother-in-law is back from the hospital and able to walk again. One of the neurologists now thinks it isn't MS, that she's been having small strokes, but they have zero explanation for the classic MS attack she had the other night. She's scheduled for another battery of tests. One day at a time, I suppose. I had a great time with the kids after we visited her in the hospital, we went to Costco and sang a bunch of silly songs I made up. Friday, April 07, 2006
Ugh. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but my mother-in-law was recently diagnosed with "undiagnosed MS". She basically has MS, but none of the tests are postive, yet all the other possibilities have been ruled out. Anyway, yesterday she had an MS attack, and basically couldn't walk or operate her limbs normally. B and I got her down to the car and B took her to the emergency room around dinner time. I fed the kids quickly and took Isabel to the pool for her swim lesson. Harry and I sat on bleachers while Isabel swam. B didn't get home until after midnight, they'd admitted her mom since she can't walk. I won $44 the other night at poker, after introducing a new game, "spit-n-shit". It was mentioned in Phil Gordon's Little Green Book as one of his memorable games from being a member of the tiltboys home games. Pretty fun game, because at the end you have to declare high or low, and the one time I could have been beaten both ways, I picked high and he picked low, so we split, and the other time I came to a showdown I had a stronger hand, picked the same, and took the whole pot. Google up "tiltboys house rules" for the rules. (ha! use my sidebar google search to earn me money!) Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Yesterday the weather was sunny with a breeze, so when I got home and found out that dinner was 45 minutes away, I loaded up the kids and the kite and went to Kite Hill in Magnuson park (~3 minutes away) and we flew the kite for about 20 minutes. Harry liked the kite just fine, but preferred to run up and down the hill like a crazed weasel, but Isabel absolutely loved it. She could be trusted to not let go, and she'd run up and down the hill pulling the kite high or letting it drift down then yanking on it. Reminds me of being not much older than her as a kid in Boise, when my parents had a 2.5 acre lot with 2 acres of that being pasture. I'd make kites out of two sticks and some newspaper and string, and fly them for hours. There is a lot more consistant wind in Boise. Tuesday, April 04, 2006
"I don't know why, but fire made it good." -Homer Simpson Last Saturday my friend Wendell and his wife had their annual spring party. Normally it's held in May, when their baby ducks and geese are hatched, but they'll be in Europe then so they held it early this year. It was raining lightly in the morning, but the kids have mud boots and if we let rain stop us from having fun we'd never do anything and soon hate living here. We drove the kids out in the morning, they got to climb into the chicken coops and pull out the eggs, they got to feed the ducks, and Isabel fed one of the goats. Holy crap, they have a pair of Indian Runner ducks, they are so damn cute, standing WAY upright and just bookin' around. Very amusing. Unfortunately Isabel had dance class so we couldn't stick around for the goat/llama/alpaca shearing. Those suckers all looked like giant fuzzballs that morning, having not been sheared in a year (or two for the llama). After dance class another buddy came over and we drove back over. The livestock looked hilarious running around bald. All the wool is turned into sweaters. It was time to start working on the large slashpile. Many piles of brush were mounded up, and we hauled them all over to the burn pile. Eventually we had a mound about 8' high and maybe twice that wide. I save used cooking grease for the fire, and had a large baby formula jar full of frozen beef fat that I stuck in the bottom, and a two liter bottle of used taco fry oil, which I mixed with a couple of gallons of gasoline for accellerant. I had Wendell hold my beer while I climbed on top of the pile and sloshed the gas/oil mixture all over the place. Here is a picture of me climbing up on the pile, not yet at the peak, with Wendell standing next to the pile for perspective. Unfortunately the camera being used sucked and failed to get the shot of me drinking from my beer while pouring gas with the other hand. Wooo! I almost always get too cautious. This year I used about five gallons of gas, and it was barely BARELY enough. The wood was pretty wet and it wasn't packed very well. We used a road flare to start it, and let me tell you once a road flare gets lit along it's entire length, that sumbitch gets awful bright. The initial flare-up of gasoline caused a lovely ~20' column of flame. Eventually, aided by the shopvac set on "blow" and me tossing quarts of gas onto strategic parts of the fire, we got a good coal bed going and there wasn't anything that was going to stop it. I totally failed my mission to get the pile burned to just coals in 45 minutes, but everyone had fun. Sunday morning came damn early, stupid daylight savings. Our brunch turned out great, lots of good food. The guys collected in the living room drinking bloody marys and mimosas, and the women and children sat around the dining room table eating danishes. It was noon before everyone started to leave. Monday, April 03, 2006
Yesterday when B was painting "the parlor", aka her mother-in-law's living room aka a 2nd bedroom, I took the kids on a walk to the playground at Magnuson park. The playground is between a huge parking lot and the off leash dog park. I was sitting on a bench, watching all kids of people walk by with all sorts of dogs. There was a patch of grass next to their sidewalk, and a bunch of dogs stopped there to take a crap. The owners would clean it up and keep going. I started laughing when I realised that lots of dogs were stopped at the crap field to flop down and roll around on the dog-poo stained grass. Their owners invariably were laughing, saying things like "Oh how cute and playful!". Ha! Your dog isn't acting playful, he's rubbing shit stains into his fur. That's right, give him a big pat! Hahahahahaha. |
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