Babes and Beer |
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Drinking beer, being married, and raising kids.  A Nosuch affiliate. 
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Sunday, June 25, 2006
Yesterday we had our annual Thanksgiving in June, with a full turkey dinner except instead of having family over we invited over all our friends. Turkey dinners are just too damn tasty to have only once a year. This year we had 13 adults and 4 kids. I bought a bottle of hard cider from the farmer's market that morning made from gravenstein apples, it was really REALLY f'ing good with turkey and gravy. WOPR brought a halfrack of Session lager, made by Full Sail and bottled in 11oz stubby bottles. Everyone loves those stubbies. The caps have roshambo entries on them, so I guess you could play without making the hand gestures. Anyway, Session is a superbly hopped lager, crisp and refreshing. Maybe too heavily hopped to truly live up to it's name, but a good beer nonetheless. Saturday, June 24, 2006
Last night B and I again had babysitting and nothing to do. Sigh. Stupid Hollywood, put out something worth watching! We ended up watching the Bridget Jones sequel. It amazes me how much weight Zelweger put on for that role. The movie was pretty much crap, I'm glad it was free (recorded off the DVR), the only worthy part was the british slang. Anytime people are talking about shagging and saying sod off I'm laughing. Friday, June 23, 2006
Poor B. She feels like she's a terrible mother. Last Friday, she had taken the kids to a playground, and Isabel was hanging upside down from some monkey bars and decided she couldn't pull herself up. B was giving her a little push on her back to help her get upright when Isabel just let go, thinking B had her. She fell on her shoulder and hurt it. B checked that her arm moved in all directions, and felt all the bones to see if any place in particular hurt. Nope. On Saturday Isabel was a bit sore so B called the doctor, who said that if she can move it all around and isn't having tingling or redness or swelling, it was probably just bruised. By monday, it seemed to be getting better, but later in the week it was getting a little worse, she'd cry out as she rolled over, saying that her shoulder hurt. We got a doctor appointment for yesterday afternoon, so I took her in and they sent her for an xray that shows that indeed, she's broken her left clavicle. Well, cracked it anyway. They gave her a sling to use so she doesn't move that arm as much, and basically said it should heal fine. B still feels terrible for not taking her to the doctor immediately. Last night we had a dinner party for B's mom and her two best friends from high school. These three gals have been thick as theives for nearly 50 years since growing up together. Her one friend is the mother to Caprial Pence, the TV chef. B's mom is Cappy's godmother, which means she's B's godsister, and my godsister-in-law. Thursday, June 22, 2006
When I got home yesterday, B said she didn't want to cook, so we went to Tutta Bella again. Yummy pizza. On the way home I stopped off at Bottleworks and picked up a mixed six-pack of tasty beers in 22oz bottles. I can't wait to try them. Poker was held at a friend's house because his wife was out and he had to watch the kids. WORP cleaned up, taking $57 from the other players. I ended up down a single dollar. When I got home, amazingly B was already asleep, so I went into the computer room and read Fark and wikipedia until 1:30am, then spent 20 minutes on the phone with my college buddy who lives in Munich. I've got to go visit him again. Wednesday, June 21, 2006
I got the idea yesterday that since B doesn't have jazzercise on Tuesdays, and it's not poker night, and Isabel doesn't have swim lessons, we could have mom-in-law watch the kids and go out to see a movie. Unfortunately, there weren't any movies playing that we wanted to see. Sigh. We ended up watching "Legends of the Fall" in HiDef on comcast OnDemand for free. I didn't think I'd seen it, but it turns out I had. Heh. I get that and "A River Runs Through It" mixed together. I had to use IMDb to figure out that the actor who played the youngest brother was Elliot in ET. Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Why I love Bridget, part 341,416: After the new tenant signed the lease and gave us the check for first/last/deposit on Sunday and then left, Bridget walked into the kitchen, took off all her clothes, and started dancing, singing "I'm partying na-ked! I'm partying na-ked!" I'm guessing she was happy to have that monkey off our backs. WOPR was over last night getting his new TiVo configured since he doesn't have a landline phone. We were talking about various things, using wikipedia to look them up. I came up with the Six Degrees of Nazism on wikipedia. Any wikipedia article that contains a link can get to a page on Nazis in six clicks or less. We clicked Random Link a bunch of times to test this, constantly succeeding. RISC Computing? Seimens makes RISC chips, they're German, nazis. Some wacky mexican controvesial saint from the 1890s? Mexican history, Zimmerman telegram, Germany, Nazis. Monday, June 19, 2006
I had a very nice Father's Day. I was a little sad, I've been going to a beer festival every father's day for about the last 12-15 years, first back at the old Herb Farm when it was an herb farm with a restaurant (they sold the herb farm and moved to a strip mall), then for the past seven years at St. Edwards' Park. Isabel went with me when she was two weeks old, and hadn't missed one yet. However, this year the brewer's guild got into a spat with the promoter and lost the site at St. Edward's park, and moved it to Seattle Center. The city of Seattle believes that it's much better to have a bunch of 21-25 year olds getting smashed than to have a bunch of 30-50 year old dads with their families, and so it was strictly 21 and up. I would have gone anyway, but my youngest brother is out of town, and NotMe had just gotten married, so my primary beef-fest buddies were out. Oh well. I played a bunch of World of Warcraft, and B painted two of the walls in the living room a rich chocolate brown. Around noon we went to go get some greasy Dick's burgers, and make photocopies of the lease agreement for our rental house. The current tenants are three guys. They've been there for four years, and one decided he'd had enough. The other two didn't find a new housemate, so they're moving out as well at the end of June. I put up an ad on craigslist, got a single reply, showed him the house, and he came over Sunday to sign the lease and give us first/last/deposit. He wants to move in starting July 8th. He seems like a nice guy, he's been living in an apartment for the three years since college and wants more space. That's one monkey off my back. For dinner B made me lamb kabobs. She had mutton in Africa and hates the idea of lamb, thus despite me loving lamb I never get it unless I'm at a buffet. Sunday, June 18, 2006
It's 8:15am, I've just wrapped myself around three eggs lightly fried over easy, two pieces of toast, and a bunch of bacon. My kids are watching cartoons (Little Einsteins on Disney Channel) and I'm feeling remarkably human. Happy Father's Day to me! Yesterday was NotMe's wedding day. I spent an hour and a half yesterday morning talking to my little brother Lance. His wife is knocked up, and I'm very excited. Normally I use a calling card from Costco with a 3 cents a minute rate, but Skype said their Skypeout feature where you can call real phone numbers was free within the US until the end of the year, so I tried it. It worked flawlessly. B had made some deal with the kdis that we'd all go to the Aquarium, so we did that after lunch. I'd never been that late in the day, and I don't think I'd ever seen there big dome aqurium with so much natural sunlight. The Aquarium is under construction, they are in the middle of a huge expansion, but as part of that they took out the Steamers restaurant that was in the same pier. It was nearly 3pm, and we knew the wedding dinner wasn't until almost 8pm, so we figured we needed some form of snack. Seeing all those yummy meals on the fin swimming around gave me a hankering for some seafood, so lacking Steamers we drove up to Dukes Chowderhouse at Greenlake. Dukes was awesome. We got to sit outside in the beautiful sunshine, we ordered some quesadillas for the kids, a large order of calimari, and a large order of steamer clams, and a pint of Manny's to wash it down Yum! Just the perfect basecoat for a long night of drinking. After that we went over to NotMe's house to see how he was holding up. We'd heard that his fiancee was going to leave the house at 9am and he'd be alone all day, but she was back when we got there. They seemed happy to see us, I think they were mostly just twiddling their thumbs waiting for time to go. The wedding was on the 1920s ferry Skansonia, but they wouldn't let us on before 7pm, so a huge crowd was gathered on the pier. Fortunately I'd wisely brought Captain Flasky. NotMe's cousin Derek and I polished him off, but he didn't start out full. The ceremony was short and beautiful. One of our friends was the officiant, his second wedding performed under the authority granted to him by the State of Washington, the Universal Life Church, and the Internet. After the ceremony, it was his job to tell everyone that the bar was now open, but he gave me the high sign beforehand so I was first in line. I started off with an excellent glass of red wine. NotMe's cousin Derek works for Chateau St. Michelle, and gave NotMe the hookup. I decided to try a new theory. I figured if I never repeated a drink, I wouldn't drink too much of any one thing and thus couldn't get hung over. I had that snort of Oban from Captain Flasky, then a glass of red wine, then a gin and tonic made with Bombay Saphire (NotMe buys top shelf hootch for his shindigs!), then a bottle of Bridgeport IPA, then a bottle of Red Stripe, then I asked a very very evil LJ (of LJ & Her dogs blog) to get me another drink and she got me some fru-fru pink thing, a cosmo I guess, so I drank half that then B drank the other half, then a healthy glass of Glenlivit, then a Tanqueray martini (they were out of Bombay Saphire at this point), then a Miller Genuine Draft 16 oz plastic bottle "Pounder", then a glass of white wine, then a coffee. At the end of the wedding, after the bride and groom left in an antique Rolls Royce limo, we got kicked off the boat, and WOPR, Derek, and WOPR's little brother Ty decided we needed an after-party party, so I volunteered my place, much to B's joy. Heh. We ended up drinking at my place until 2am. Isabel woke me up at 7:45, and B was totally racked out, so I got up, had a piece of wedding cake (somehow I was given a box that I thought was the leftover booze and turned out to be leftover food) with Isabel, then started frying up some bacon and sunny-side-up eggs. I had a blast. It was great seeing a bunch of NotMe's family, and some of my friends I don't see often enough. Good Buddy Adam (aka GBA) was there with his wife Linda, and very exciting news was that Linda has a bun in the oven. You're a machine, GBA! It was also fun to talk to LJ, I almost never see her anymore. Apparently she's moving to Boston soon with her beau, I wish the best for them. I'm done for now. Friday, June 16, 2006
Last night there was a BBQ at the elementary school that Isabel is going to in the fall (Laurelhurst) so the new parents could meet each other. Holy crap what a goat rodeo. Tons of people, kids running berzerk everywhere, uff-da. B knew some of the people, and met some others. I suspect I was the only one there who was drinking, having loaded a beer into my Starbucks travel cup. Isabel's new teacher seems very nice and super full of energy. Teaching kindergarten would kill me, and I *like* kids, mostly. Thursday, June 15, 2006
Ugh. Last night I was giving Harry a bath, and when I was washing his hair, I felt a wierd bump. I look down, and ugh, there's a friggin' tick sucking away at my sweet boy's brain. He must have gotten it when B took the kids on a walk in the north idaho woods last sunday. I looked up how to remove them (use tweezes, squeeze them as close to the skin and pull out), then we looked around and found another one. Damn. Fortunately there isn't much Lyme disease in these parts, but our doctor gave him a round of antibiotics just in case. You know, my brothers and I have been in the woods all our lives, and I'd never seen a tick before. He is just at the right height, he should have been wearing a hat and a bugspray with DEET, but I don't think about DEET except when it comes to mosquitoes. Oh well, you know what they say, "Ticks are for kids!". Today was their annual checkup. Humerously, Isabel at 5 years is 47" tall and 47lbs, and Harry at 4 years is 45" tall and 45lbs. Both are doing great. Wednesday, June 14, 2006
(Lengthy posts like this sometimes kill me. All told, this was about 2 hours of writing. Sorry for the delays) I took last Friday off with the family, my brother Kurt, and a friend to go to my parent's lake place to build a new dock. Friday morning I packed, took Harry in jammies with a flashlight and blanket to his preschool for their "pajama party", loaded more stuff in the van, got the oil changed, then picked my brother up at 11am at his apartment. We walked the two blocks over to the Elysian brewery to buy nine 22oz bottles of their beer so that we wouldn't run out that night at the lake. We gassed the van up, drove home, picked up B and Isabel, drove to Harry's preschool, picked him up, drove to my friend's house, loaded up him and his tools, drove to Taco Del Mar for some burritos, then hit the highway. My brother drank several of the beers while we drove across the state, then started on the bottle of Talisker single malt scotch that was left over from NotMe's bachelor party last month. We rolled into Spokane about 5pm, and stopped at Burger Heaven in Rathdrum for some damn tasty hamburgers but terrible fries and freakily Cheeto glowing-orange onion rings. When we got to the lake house, we saw the large trailer with all the parts for the dock piled high on it. It took the three of us nearly an hour to unload the trailer. The dock consists of five sections, two are 20' by 8', two are 20' by 4', and one is a premade 20' by 4' ramp. They use large aluminum boxes filled with closed-cell foam for flotation, and 20' pressure-treated 2x8s to hold it all together, with a Trex-like recycled plastic decking. None of it is light. My folks showed up a little later, and we sat up until 11pm talking and drinking. My mom has insomnia, however, and only ended up getting about an hour of sleep. She was down in the kitchen at 5am when the sun came up and woke up my friend. He went down and they started talking and drinking coffee in the kitchen. I may have mentioned before about how the sound travels very well throughout the house, and our room was the one immediately over the kitchen, so this soon woke up the kids, and then B woke me up so I'd haul the kids downstairs and let her sleep. Breakfast consisted of an enormous vat of oatmeal, with bowls of raisins, dried cranberries, fresh blueberries, walnuts, brown sugar, and a jug of heavy whipping cream. Holy crap, cream is just too damn heavy to use on cereal. I nearly mixed it 50/50 with water to get nearer to milk. It was damn nice in coffee, however. As a result, I had no idea that we were all done and out working by 7am. The weather was lousy, overcast, raining sometimes, windy, kind of cold, just plain oogy. The finished dock sections weighed over 1100 pounds, so the damn things had to be assembled in the water, which meant we spent the day standing knee deep in thankfully-not-freezing lake water while bending over to work. My 2nd oldest brother showed up at 11am with his wife, his two daughters, and each daughter had brought a friend. My mom had given him $200 to buy beer with, to fill the legendary "Ark of the Kromvenant", his large wheeled beer cooler that had starred at many Brother Reunions. My sister-in-law joked that the 11th Commandment was "Thou Shalt Not Work Without Beer". I had thought that $200 was crazy, and I was right, it only took $60 to fill the Ark. Let's see how many of the beers I can name: Red Stripe, Guiness in the classic bottles, no smoothifiers, Indica IPA, Belk's ESB, Pilsner Urquel, Laughing Dog's Sweet Stout, and there had to be two more since there were eight six packs. Once the frames were together, we had to start putting down the pre-cut decking down, which was very time consuming, and there were a zillion huge bolts to attach the beefy hinges between dock sections. I spent hours cranking away with a 3/4" deep socket. Once we had a section done, the boys continued while my dad and I hauled that section to the nearby boat launch. We had seven 80lb concrete cinder blocks plus a frigging heavy chunk of elevator counterweight that my dad had gotten from work. It was just pig iron, but must have weighed 200-250lbs. We levered all this onto a piece of plywood on the edge of the dock section for use as an anchor. We had 200' of anchor cable, and tied one end to a eye-bolt set into the sea wall, ran it under the dock sections where it attached to each one with chains, and out into the lake to the anchor. My dad can now move the dock in or out along the anchor line depending on the lake level. Speaking of lake level, at least it wasn't ALL the way full to the sea wall like it was at easter, it was down a bit giving us like 6' of beach to work with. We wrapped things up for the day at 7pm and had dinner. I was totally beat and mostly frozen, so I grabbed B and we went to use the sauna. My younger brother was already in there, and my 16 year old niece and her friend joined us as well. It was a little tight, but fortunately my folks built a large sauna. It was over 150F in there, but we wanted it HOT so I fired up the heating unit and started slathering water over the rocks. Mmmmmmmm. Damn I love a good sauna session. I *so* want one. I'd much rather have a sauna than a hottub, and I love a soak in hot water as well. Too bad the sauna has no view and the hot tub is on the deck overlooking the lake... Everyone said we were out of luck for a fire since it had been raining and all the wood was wet, and my dad's portable propane tank was empty so we couldn't use his propane torch to start one. I said pshaw to that and went to the shed, found out dad doesn't have a hatchet but does have a splitting maul, found two sorta-dry logs, and split them into small kindling. I found an old newspaper, and with 4 sheets of that and my pile of kindling I got a nice hot fire started, which was sufficient to dry out the wet logs we threw on it. My folks crashed early, they're both still seriously jet lagged from just returning from 3 weeks in Prague, and my mom not sleeping the night before, so the rest of us hung out around the fire, slowly but surely killing off all the beers in the Ark. I crashed around 11pm, but my brothers made it up until 1am. Ugga, I had to drive across the state the next day, I wasn't going to get crazy or anything. The next morning was clear, sunny, and beautiful. We got the last of the decking secured and most of the guys loaded up on the dock section with the anchor for the anchor launch. Most of us were counter-weights to try and keep it from tipping over, but we all had paddles and headed out into the lake. I was the only one smart enough to bring a breakfast beer along, one of the last two Guinesses (mom had hid the other one, she's pretty wiley for an old lady!), and my older brother had decided he needed a wee dram of the Talisker "just to whet his whistle". We had left a line from our dock to the main dock so we could just pull ourselves back in, but the task grew too thirsty, so we had my friend tie the bottle of Talisker to the rope so we could pull it out to us. We had ourselves a little toast, since we were pretty certain that dumping 700-800 pounds off the side of the dock that was partially submerged was going to toss all of us off the dock if not flip the damn thing. I wasn't going into the lake cold sober damn it. As it turned out, the anchor launch was anti-climactic, the dock didn't tip and nobody was dumped into the lake with hilarious results. Nobody even got snagged on the anchor cable and pulled under to their doom. Ah well, maybe next time. The drive back across the state was uneventful. The kids were super well behaved, they are road warriors. Tuesday, June 13, 2006
B hid some leftover easter candy somewhere in the house. It was driving me crazy, I could not for the life of me figure out where the heck it was. Finally, a month and a half later, I found it. On my dresser, under some clothes. D'oh! I've been having fun lately with Wikipedia. My favorite quote is "In theory, wikipedia could never work. In practice, it does." Tonight I was looking up "Chutes and Ladders", because I had to play it with my kids. (shudder). That led me to Jaques of London, a game maker since 1795, then to Tiddlywinks, which they made, then to see there were no other 1889 Introductions, so I looked at 1890 Introductions, the only entry was a Vesta Case, which was a box to hold matches for smokers. This led to an article on tobacco smoking, which had a part about the Nazi's being anti-smoking, and a quote about George Lincoln Rockwell, who apparently created an American Nazi Party in the 1960s despite being a WW2 vet. Chutes and Ladders to the American Nazi Party in 8 steps. Wikipedia is awesome. Sunday, June 04, 2006
Funny, I missed my 5-year blogversary a few weeks back. Not something I think much about, I guess, and if I have to miss some form of anniversary, at least it's not one dealing with my family. I will take this time to thank Mr Nosuch for both getting me to start this and for the hosting. I've greatly enjoyed it, and enjoy reading old entries. It actually serves as part of my memory. Friday I got home early and we drove up to the Montlake Terrace pool. B had arranged a meat, cheese, and cracker tray, a 3 level cupcake tree with Hello Kitty plastic rings stuck in them, a bunch of chopped-up fruit, and a huge plate of peanut butter and jelly sandwich quarters, plus juice boxes and a case of bottle water. There were like 8 girls there for the party, and they'd all brought wrapped jammies for a jammie exchange which was very popular. Personally I would have killed everyone in the room for one drop of cold sweet beer, you should never have to suffer through a 5 year old's birthday party cold sober, but I failed to bring Captain Flasky so I was flat-out SOL. After the party part some of the girls had to leave and the rest of them changed into swimsuits and we all jumped into the pool. The pool was totally emptied out except there was another party going on at the same time. The kids had a total blast, and I am honestly impressed with how well Isabel is doing with her swim lessons. She is super comfortable in the water. Afterwards we got cleaned up and it was 7pm, but we were all still hungry, so we took Isabel to her favorite restaurant, Red Robin, and amazingly only had a 10 minute wait for a table. I guess all the people who got tables at 5:45 were just leaving, since if you show up there at 6pm you've got an hour wait. The food was good and fast, Isabel got sang to by the employees and got a free chocolate sundae, I got my large beer, it was very nice. On the way home a car cut over without looking and if B hadn't done an amazing swerve we would have crunched bigtime. I have to give some kudos to the suspension on that Kia minivan, front and rear anti-sway bars help a lot. Then I noticed the license plate on the guy who nearly hit us and noticed it was a professor from work. Man I'm going to have to give him a ration of shit on Monday. In his defense, the sun was coming right from where he needed to see, but geez. I don't think he even knows how close he was to a major collision. After we put the kids to bed, we took off to go down to Seattle Center (where the 1962 World's Fair was held) since we have an annual membership at the Pacific Science Center, which includes 3 free IMAX movies, which was showing Poseidon. I was pretty sure our free passes wouldn't work for a non-old non-IMAX movie, which was correct, but it didn't matter, they only had a 9:30pm showing the first week, Friday their last showing was like 7:30pm. Of course, one of the box office windows still listed the 9:30pm showing. I figured as long as we were down there we should go to the Fun Forest and ride the rollercoaster there. Hands down it is the most fun in the smallest space of any rollercoaster I've ever been on, for a tiny coaster it's awesome. Unfortunately, it's also no longer there. They still had the kiddie coaster, but not the adult one. Sigh. Oh well. We drove down to the Pacific Place garage, parked, went up to that theater, saw that the only movie playing in the next hour that B wanted to see was DaVinci Code, which I was NOT excited to see. Too much hype, and I thought the book was basically crap, waaay too much bullshit numerology for me. We walked over to the Meridian theater and saw they didn't have crap as well, so B decided on DaVinci Code. I was impressed, the movie was fun and enjoyable. Yesterday morning after B got back from her jazzercise class we loaded up and went for a walk through the ravine, played at the Cowen Park playground, and went to the University District Farmer's Market for some fresh veggies and cheese curds. It was Isabel's last day for the spring session of dance class, which is parent's watching day. B and Peggy were going to watch, but Harry was saying he wanted to stay home. Isabel said, "Harry, you need to come watch me, since Daddy needs a little quiet time at the bar. I know you love your Daddy very much, so you should want him to have five minute's peace". B and I were dyin' laughing while driving. After her dance class I took her to the flower store around the corner to buy her a bouquet. She got to pick out individual flowers and the lady made her up a freakin' gorgeous bouquet, with two pink roses as the centerpiece. Ten bucks, I'll be going back to that place again if they survive. It's a very new shop, it had the smallest selection of flowers I've ever seen at a florist. I don't envy them. Gotta go, apparently we're all going to the mall. Friday, June 02, 2006
Wow. Today is Isabel's 5th birthday. She was very excited this morning. Harry gave her a shirt with a sequinned "Hello Kitty" on it, and she got a huge 3d turtle kite from her uncle Kurt, and our friends whose kids B watch gave her two sets of Polly Pockets. Plus I gave her and Harry a cookie before breakfast this morning, heh. B was making coffee cake for them when I left, sadly I miss out. This afternoon she's having a Hello Kitty themed pool party "just for girls", instead of presents they are going to have a pajama exchange. Each one is supposed to be labled with size, but I don't know if there are going to be anyone else Isabel's size to exchange with. Thursday, June 01, 2006
Well, B is back, the kids did great, and my cold is mostly over. B had a great time in Texas, but thunderstorms almost made her miss her connecting flight in Dallas. On the iPod front, with the car charger allowing a battery recharge without resetting the shuffle playlist, I'm on 640 of 665 songs. I was thinking this morning that a funny feature would be to have Casey Kasem give an into and triva bit for each song on a playlist. |
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