Babes and Beer |
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Drinking beer, being married, and raising kids.  A Nosuch affiliate. 
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Friday, March 29, 2002
Went to Bridget's OB yesterday. The doc says that starting Sunday, if Bridget went into labor they wouldn't try to stop it. Due date is six weeks from sunday, May 12th. Uff. I'm starting to get a little paranoid about finding a cheap crib before then and getting Isabel moved downstairs. That might be a tough battle for a bit. Sometimes she goes right to sleep, other times she cries while I hold her for maybe a half an hour, squirming all around, until she gets exhausted and falls asleep in my arms. It's going to be strange for her having a new room.
Down to the final stretch. Hmmm, now my life won't be just babes and beer, I'll have a little guy in it too. I think I'll refer to him as "The Boy". As in, "Bring me The Boy." heh. Isabel and The Boy. heh. Well, I crack myself up anyway. :) Babes, Beer, and The Boy. (blogger won't post this grrr!!) Thursday, March 28, 2002
I got my new driver's license in the mail yesterday. They've switched to a new format, it's kinda funky looking when you're used to the old one.
Talking about it with Bridget this morning made me think of a few funny stories about ID. Washington has used a hologram on their DL for a long time, when Bridget lived in CA for a while before she joined Peace Corps, a barmaid once refused her service because since she couldn't see a "seal" of some sort it must be a fake ID. Bridget was tryin' to explain to her you could see the freakin' hologram if you tilt the card away from you... Sigh. My younger brother wanted a fake ID to see Judas Priest play at a bar when he was 20. He was 3 months away from being 21, and to this day he still doesn't drink, but he needed a fake ID. He went to the DOL, said he lost his license and gave his name as my immediate younger brother, and they issued him a legit state DL with his picture and his brother's info. Funny. That's about as legit a fake ID as you can get. He went to the show, had a great time, and like a doofus lost the ID there. It didn't matter much, he didn't need it again anyway. Nowadays that wouldn't work because they keep the picture digitally stored to prevent just such fraud. For the next story, set your WayBack(tm) machine to the year 1988. One of the guys I worked with at Microsoft (we did tech support for all their Mac apps, word, excel, powerpoint, etc) was named Anthony Rossano. MS had concatenated his name down to "Anthor" for his email address, and we loved it and immediately called him Anthor from then on. Anthor drove the AnthorBeast, a 1970 green Ford Galaxie 500. It was all smashed to crap all the time, he was a frat boy and one of their favorite activites was to get drunk, load the back seat of the AnthorBeast with drunk pledges, and drive around the U District plowing over wooden signposts. I think he got over 50 of them in his career. The car was covered in dents, skate punk stickers, computer geek stickers (DayStar Digital 33MHz 68030 upgrade! Woo!) and had a surfboard tail fin glued to the front of the hood like a shark fin. He kept the bottom half of a mannequin legs-up in the back seat, complete with panties, stockings, and a garter belt. One time one of his fellow frat brothers was pissed off about some chick, and wanted to break something. Anthor volunteered to let the guy ram his car into the AnthorBeast. One 1988 Toyota Supra rammed into the driver's door. Total damage to AnthorBeast: Another small dent. Total damage to frat boy's mom's car: Over $5000. Dork dork dork! During the 1990 Goodwill Games held in Seattle, Anthor found behind Husky Stadium where they parked all the school buses they were using to haul athletes around. He got some "Goodwill Games Official Vehicle" signs and glued them to the AnthorBeast. A cop spotted him at a gas station and made him remove and return the signs. Oh, crickey. Sorry, got to rambling a bit there. Anthor got pulled over and had forgotten his wallet. He reached into the back seat of the AnthorBeast and pulled out the 30Mb external SCSI hard drive from his Mac, he'd been working on some PageMaker thing or another at home. He told the befuddled police officer that it was his Microsoft ID, and it contained a scanned picture of him, his whole record, etc etc etc. He managed to BS the cop and got off on the speeding ticket. Anthor is a great BS artist. The last story has my buddy Parker also in CA (on the way to a Husky Rose Bowl, wooO!) at a bar. They wanted a second form of ID in addition to his DL. He pulled out his concealed pistol license. Mind you, you can't get one in CA, so the bouncer freaked. "Whoa, they let you carry a gun?!? Are you carrying one now? How do you get a license like this?!? You must be important!!!" Ha! Wednesday, March 27, 2002
I am totally excited. Rush has been my favorite band for a long long time, and they've got a new album due out May 14th. It's been over five years since their last album was released, but their drummed has had a hard time of it. His teen aged daughter was killed in a car accident, and his wife died of breast cancer shortly after it was diagnosed. Uff. I'm glad they're back, I wouldn't have blamed them for calling it quits after all these years.
They released their last album, 'Test For Echo', back in 1996. They did a two-leg concert tour, the first leg skipped the Pacific Northwest entirely. I wasn't about to risk missing out, so I and two buddies flew down to San Diego to catch them their. That concert rocked, they did it in a format called "An Evening With Rush" with no opening band, just 2.5 hours of music. They played all of 2112, a 20+ minute song, something they haven't done in decades. The second leg of the tour in the spring of 1997 did include the northwest. They had a Portland, OR show on a Thurs, a Vancouver BC show on a Friday, and they did the Gorge outdoor Amphitheater in George, WA on Saturday. (Many bands do the Gorge these days instead of playing Seattle. It's a two-hour drive, which sucks. Oh well). My plan was to see all three, but my buddy Sean fucked that up by having that weekend be his wedding. I promptly got myself demoted from best man to mere groomsman. I went to see them in Portland, it rocked. I drove back the next day, and went to the wedding rehersal. On Saturday, I went to the afternoon wedding, went to 45 minutes of the reception, then drove like a bat out of Hades to the Gorge that night. On the way I was doin' about 88mph on the freeway down into the Columbia River Gorge (George and the Amphitheater are on the other side) when I got this curious feeling that maybe I should slow down. I did so, and around the next bend was a state patrolman with a radar gun and a bunch of motorcycle patrolmen as well. Uff-da! That would have delayed my Rush concert!!! The Rush gods were favoring me. I made it to that show, it rocked like the Portland and San Diego shows. Supposedly they're going on tour again this summer, I can't wait. The first single from their new album is released to radio stations on Friday, I can't wait for that, either. Tuesday, March 26, 2002
Ever have that not-so-fresh feeling?!? Ugga. You know, ten years ago I could get blotto on a weeknight and feel fine the next day. Last night I only had five beers and I feel relatively crappy today. Not sick-as-a-dog puking hungover, just not-so-fresh. Uggy feeling. Blech.
It was my monthly investment club meeting. This time it was held at my place, but 5 minutes before they got there I didn't have any munchies. I'd been too busy to think about it over the weekend, but I came up with "bar snack" as my theme. A couple batches of popcorn, some peanuts, and some pretzels and we were set. We had to deal with one member leaving because of various issues, but one of the reasons was because we're got a bunch of shares of this pre-IPO stock that now looks like it'll never be worth anything. I haven't completely written them off, but I'm also not expecting much if anything. Anyway, when he left he went straight to the treasurer and got a check for his share, with that pre-IPO stock which should be valued on the books at $0 (what we can get for it currently) but is on the books at the $0.25/share price we paid. The treasurer mis-read the charter and cashed him out instead of making him wait for a meeting so we could vote on what to do. So, basically he screwed his buddies for $157. Crazy talk if you ask me. What makes things a little worse in my mind is that he was one of the people that pushed so hard to get us to buy the pre-IPO stock in the first place. Oh well, its worth it to know someone's true colors. After the meeting got out a half dozen of us gathered in my living room to drink further and shoot the shit. I mean, in essence we're a drinking club with an investing problem. We discussed one member getting dumped recently, one member is having his first baby in July and his wife is slightly psycho, she won't take anything used even though they have a ton of relatives with older kids who could deluge them with quality baby stuff. Then we spent an hour discussing "peace" in the middle east. Obviously it'll never happen. Ugga. Monday, March 25, 2002
Another busy weekend.
On Friday afternoon there was some email chitchat asking if anything was going on that night. Bridget's friends were taking her out to a fancy restaurant for a baby shower for #2, so I was stuck home with Isabel. I emailed that I'd be home with the baby and a buttload of Guinness and some DVDVDVDVDs, but didn't expect any company. A few minutes after I got home at 4:15 the first guests arrived, and we began drinking. By 7pm we were fairly toasty because we hadn't eaten yet. The most sober person got hornswaggled into driving to a nearby tempura house for take-out. I put Isabel to bed around 9pm, and shortly thereafter all my friends had gone home. I went upstairs to read but crashed before 10. Bridget got home around midnight and woke me up, we chit-chatted until 2am. On Saturday we played with the baby in bed for a while, then went downstairs, fed her, and packed up for a trip to Costco. $200 later we had a bunch of costco crap and a set of new 2.4Ghz fones that can intercom between the two. Bridget had been wanting to replace our 900Mhz fones for a while. After lunch it was a beautiful sunny day so I spread a blanket on the front lawn for Bridget and Isabel. Isabel would crawl all around the perimeter, but when she was at the edge, she'd put her hand down to touch the lawn and immediately yank it back. It was very cute. During her nap Bridget and I worked on her new bedroom. She has to move out of the upstairs nursery asap, the new one is due in less than seven weeks. (uff-da!) The downstairs room used to have a six year old girl living in it, and the trim was all pink. Bridget painted the trim white, she painted the walls an excruciatingly bright yellow, with a 1' white stripe around the middle of the room and one along the ceiling. The middle stripe is getting a set of 6" wooden letters A-Z, which each letter painted bright red, blue, or green. The ceiling is getting alternate dinosaurs and elephants from some foam stamps Bridget has and red yellow blue and green paint. It's pretty cute. We desperately need a second crib. After the baby woke up we went to Cockbuster (aka Blockbuster) and rented Training Day (good, if slightly too long, Denzel is a kick-ass actor who deserved Best Actor) and went to safeway to buy fixin's for a fancy "date night" dinner. A pair of 24oz T-bones, a pound of steamer clams, some mushrooms, some tasty rolls, brocolli, spinach salad with gorganzola, and strawberries to put on the leftover cheesecake from Bridget's baby shower. Mmmm, MEAT! Damn tasty! On Sunday it's my shift to get up early to be with Isabel while Bridget sleeps in. We played in her baby jail (did I mention baby jail yet? Six 1m sections of plastic fencing blocking a corner of the living room off, full of her toys), fed her breakfast, crawled around the dining room, and finally at 9am went up to play with Bridget a little. By 11am I had to be at my friend's house, helping him wire up his basement. It's all bare stud walls, so in four hours I installed about 15 electric outlets and we hung four can lights. A *ton* more work to do there. While we were working my friend Corey called us, he was looking at a condo with our real estate agent Corey Patt. For some reason my friend Corey is mentally defective, he can't remember his own name, and calls our agent "Mary Patt". Um, Corey, how the hell can YOU of all people not know the name Corey?!?! He must have a mental block about using his name on a woman. Anyway, the condo he was looking at was pretty sweet. 1200 squares, 2 bedrooms, two baths, top floor unit with some skylights, a fireplace, a freakin' wet bar in the living room, it was awesome. The countertops and cabinets and fireplace were all mega-dated, the place was built in 1980 to full 1970's specs, but it was only $130k. A condo across the street was 600 squares 1 bedroom, but "newer" for $155k. Uff! You could easily update that place for a few thousand. My new renters called, the washing machine wasn't spinning, and the main bathroom sink wasn't draining. I went over there, figured out the outlet the washer was plugged into was fubar, fixed it temporarily, fixed the clogged drain with my Drain Blaster 3000 (it's not really called that. It's this dealybob on the end of a hose, you feed it into the drain pipe and turn on the water. It expands like a balloon to seal to the sides of the pipe then blasts a jet of high-pressure water blowing the clog away.) Then I hauled ass back home, changed, and we loaded up to go to a friend's daughter's third birthday party. They had a party at 5pm on a sunday but with no dinner. Some appetizers, sure, but no dinner. Crickey. Two of the three pregnant ladies nearly staged a revolt. We ended up going to McRonalds on the way home to get Bridget a quarter pounder. Friday, March 22, 2002
Mmm! Tasty dinner!
Last night I decided to cook, I made Arroz Con Pollo. Basically, you make a spicy oil oil paste and coat some chicken legs with it. Put 'em in the fridge to let the spices absorb. Meanwhile, in a heavy fry pan cook up a bunch of linguica or dry chorizo chopped into inch chunks. Once they're nice and crispy, remove em and put the chicken. Brown the chicken good, then remove and set aside. Dump a chopped onion, some garlic, some bay leaves, and a chopped red peppar into the pan, fry until soft. Add a can of diced tomatoes and their juice, two cups of rice, and three cups of chicken broth. Add the fried linguica and chicken legs, simmer for five minutes. Put it in a large ovenproof pan, bake for 25 minutes until the chicken is done and the rice has absorbed all the goodness. Mmmmmm! It kicked ass. Last time I made it I totally messed it up. It calls for 1/2 a teaspoon of cayenne, but that was the day I learned B was pregnant again, and I was a little freaked. I mis-read the recipe and ended up using 2 tablespoons of cayenne. That's 12 times too much. Crickey. It was kinda good, but so freakin' hot it wasn't even funny. I ended up making another two cups of plain white rice to mix in with it. My birthday is coming up, I need to renew both my drivers license ($25) and my concealed pistol license ($32). Cripes, those fees add up. Plus the fact that to renew my CPL I have to go downtown to the county courthouse some weekday between 9am and 4pm, what a pain. Ah, the hoops they make you jump to carry a gun. Thursday, March 21, 2002
Woo! Won $22 at poker last night. It's nice offsetting some of my recent losses.
For those keeping track, we've got more Isabel baby videos up. Isabel at Swim Class with bonus footage of hugely pregnant Bridget. Isabel Reading Her Book, my personal favorite. Isabel Playing Ball Wednesday, March 20, 2002
Wooo! We got three nice young buttrockers signed to a lease at our rental house last night. Now that the deposit check is in hand, I am much happier. They were going to see Rob Zombie after they signed. The house is going back to the way it was, 3 25-ish single guys living there. They seem very nice. I'll be helping them ressurect my old whole-house ethernet network, too.
That gets one monkey off my back. Now I need to get my house refinanced, we currently have a first and a second mortgage, because when we bought it the limit on non-jumbo mortgages was 240k, and you pay a big penalty for going to a jumbo mortgage, so we got the max non-jumbo and a smaller higher-interest 2nd to pay the rest. Now the jumbo limit is 300.7k, so we can roll them both into one low rate, plus rates are so freakin' low now we might be able to get 6.5% or lower. Eight weeks until the new baby boy comes. Whoa. Tuesday, March 19, 2002
I love St. Patrick's Day. I'm approximately 0% Irish (I'm 25% Swedish, 25% Finn (aka 50% Skandahoovian) and 50% german), but I bet some of my ancestors raided and pillaged Ireland.
Regardless, I love Guinness and I love corned beef. In years past we used to go out to a bar for St. Patricks Day, have a tasty corned beef or bangors-n-mash dinner, and drink heavily. However, we got screwed a bunch of times. One year we went to FX McRory's, a huge bar that probably holds 200 people, and there were over 500 people in line at 3pm. Um, I doubt they all got in eventually, and I certainly don't want to wait hours without beer. Another year we went to Coopers, a more local alehouse with 40 taps, they had run out of corned beef by 5pm. Crickey! Anyway, we stopped going out and started having our own celebration a few years back. This year Bridget and I hosted. We went to Market House Corned Beef, they make the absolute best corned meef in Seattle. It's a funny shop, they're open 10am to noon monday thru saturday. They sell commercially too, so by Monday before St Pats they've sold out of retail and close up. Bridget went there, and a surly guy from the cold room yells out weights of slabs, and if it's close enough, you yell out and you get it. She got a 9.5lb slab, good thing too cuz we had 11 people RSVP, and 15 adults and 5 kids showed up. Their directions are to take a heavy covered roasting pan. Fill 1/4" with water, 1/4" with classic coke. (Those are roughly 0.5cm for those using non-spastic measuring systems) Place brisket fat side up. Cover, cook at 300F for 3.5 hours, then turn off oven and let sit in oven for 1-1.5hours more. DAMN it made for awesome corned beast. We took the drippings and boiled up 3 heads of cabbage, 7.5lbs (~3kg) of potatoes, and a dozen carrots. The veggies are so good boiled in meat juice. A few heathens in my peer group don't like corned beef, so I got some british bangors (sausages) and boiled them in beer for an hour. Bridget also made some irish soda bread. It was a tasty meal. I nearly gave myself severe meat poisoning eating too much. MEAT! Mmmm. Saturday, March 16, 2002
Ah, back from Vegas. The annual trip with the boys. "The Boys" being three of my friends from highschool. Two of them I've known since gradeschool.
Sean is an investment banker, earns in the healthy six figures. Doesn't live like he does, (ie he drives a old piece of shit nissan sentra with no options that's practically destroyed) because he's socking everything away so he can retire at age 40. He's well on his way. He's the planner, he finds the deals and books the airfare/hotel/rental car. Finding cheap travel deals is one of his minor super-powers. He's also pretty anal, his cost spreadsheets are almost ridiculously accurate. For instance, we were all arriving and leaving at different times, so he calculated and pro-rated our share of the rental car based on how many *minutes* we were all going to be in Vegas. You know if Sean tells you that you owe him $17.31, that's what you owe. Good friend, mildly crazy. We lived together for years in college. Corey never went to college, he's been working in copy centers for years. We're always asking him "So, how's that green button treating you?". Sean and I are currently working on getting him to buy a condo. He loves to gamble, and is a big big guy. I mean, big. I'd guess he's closer to 500lbs than 400. Uff. You do NOT want to sit next to him in coach on an airplane. Mikey never successfully left Spokane. He's lived with his manipulative mother until he finally got married a year ago to a girl he met on ICQ. She's at least relatively normal. Mikey is a great guy, but christ what baggage. Mikey and Sean have a "dare" pact going. Neither has ever not done something the other dared him to do, dating back to high school. Neither pushes it too far, since they know they'd get screwed in return. Anyway, those are the boys. For various reasons, we were almost all flying down at different times. Sean and Corey flew down on Sunday. Mikey flew down on Monday afternoon, and I flew down Monday evening. Bridget dropped me off at the airport around 6pm for my 8pm flight. This was my first post-9/11 flight, so I was curious what security would be like. There was absolutely NO line when I got there, so they took me aside and searched my shoes and tested my carry-on for explosives. I didn't check any bags, I was only going away for 48hrs. Once through security I had two hours to burn by myself. I went to CJ Borgs, a brewpub in Alaska Airline's concourse, and sat down to read and drink a few tasty pints of Deschute's Black Butte porter. Mmm! (I really like Alaska, their milage plan miles never expire, which kicks ass!) The flight was uneventful, and once I was there Sean and Mikey picked me up. Apparently Corey had ditched them to gamble. The rental car was a full-size, which in this case was a Dodge Intrepid. Big freakin' car. We headed back to the Luxor where we were staying, where we found Corey. It was nearly midnight by this point, and I was fired up to stay up until at least 4am. (I'd gotten up at 5am, so 23hours seemed a good goal.) My first goal was to find some cheap sunglasses. I knew a bright yellow orb would be appearing in the sky the next morning. (Hey, I'm from Seattle. I have faint memories of such an orb when I was a child in Spokane, but normally I'm safe from it) We found a Walgreens just down the strip, I picked up a bottle of gatoraid "for later" and a can of cheese doodles. Mmmm, salty snacks. We needed some place to drink. The bar in the Luxor had some annoying band playing, and was packed anyway, so we figured nobody goes to the Stardust anymore, we'd go there. Man, the Stardust is an old pile of crap nowadays. There were only a few people in the bar there, and effectively no waitservice. They did serve Guinness, which was a pleasant surprise. I had two cups of coffee as well. That plus the pepsi on the plane and MAN was I flyin'! I don't know why, but in the last five years since I quit caffiene, even small doses *really* effect me. I was wound up like Beavis in his Cornholio alter-ego. "I am the Great Cornholio! I need TP for my bunghole! Come out with your pants down!" After shootin' the shit for a while Mikey wandered off to gamble. We eventually found him losing his ass at Blackjack. Sean and Corey joined in, and that dealer was freakin' amazing. Sean and Corey would have 20 each, Mikey would bust, and the dealer had a seven showing. His down card was another seven, Wooo! But, his draw was A FREAKIN' THIRD SEVEN! Damn! Glad I wasn't playing! After they'd all lost about a hundred bucks, we headed back to the Luxor. The Luxor is the coolest hotel. It's a big ass 300' hollow black glass pyramid with a life-size Sphynx in front. Each level of rooms has a balcony looking down upon the food court level which is above the casino. From Sean's room up on the 27th floor, you were practically at the peak of the pyramid. I'm not one to be afraid of heights, but it even gave ME the heeby-geebies to lean over that balcony and have empty space below. Uff. At this point it was 3am and Mikey is whining that he's been up since 6am. He bags out and goes to bed. Sean, Corey, and I have some more beer at the bar in the Luxor (the band had gone home) and finally crash at 4am. I'm still wired on caffiene. I wake up at 8am, *still* freakin' wired. RrrrRRrrrrrRRrrrrrRR! Some alka-seltzer, a shower, and I head down to the casino. Amazing how they run 24x7, you can barely tell a difference. The 8am gamblers are a different crowd than the 4am ones. Corey was already up, playin' mini-baccarrat. It's basically playin' heads or tails, with a long-shot bet available if you think it'll land on "edge". Corey is the only non-asian anywhere near mini-baccarat. I mean, the players, the dealer, even the pit boss in that section is asian. Pretty funny. I asked him how it was goin, he raised up his drink and says, "I love Vegas. It may be 8am, but if you ask for cranberry juice, they just naturally assume you meant with vodka." ha! Anyway, I left him to his gambling and moseyed over to the moving conveyor belt that hauls you to the next-door casino, the Excalibur. I'd read that that corner of the Strip, Las Vegas Blvd, has between those four casinos (Excalibur, New York New York, Tropicana, and MGM Grand) more hotel rooms than the entire city of Los Angeles. Big damn hotels, lemme tell you. The Excalibur is showing definate signs of age itself, but it does contain one must-visit: A Krispy Kreme donut shop. I get two fresh hot ones right off the conveyor, still dripping hot oil, mmmmm! What a great breakfast! Those suckers when hot are just three quick bites, each one disolving instantly in your mouth. Damn good donuts. After the donuts I give B a call to see how my family is doing. Isabel loves to talk on the fone, she gets a huge smile and looks around for the person. I wander back, watch Corey win some and lose some, hook up with Mikey, and finally around 11:30 we start harassing Sean to wake up. We get his lazy ass out of bed to go find some cheap steak-and-eggs. Arizona Charlies is way the hell in the middle of retail LV, nowhere near the Strip, but the cafe there has $2.49 steak-n-eggs 24hrs. Man is it a dump, too. Almost exclusively old folks hooked to slot machines. We get seated, and I notice they've also got a $2.49 bone-in ham-n-eggs special. I decide to order 'em both. Heck, it's only five bucks. I get a tiny steak (maybe 4oz), four eggs, a big-ass slice of ham, 8 pieces of toast, and a flaming metric buttload of hash browns. I polished it all off except for the hash browns, I prefer 'em a lot more fried than they usually are. I suppose I could ask for them that way, but cripes, where would I have put them? I already had to use my patented hollow left leg to store half that meal. My caffiene buzz is now long gone. Fully bloated, we head back to the Luxor, it's about 2:30pm at this point. I figured out that the bar at the Luxor serves Newcastle Brown Ale, a tasty beer from the UK. I pretty much ended up drinkin' Newkies the whole rest of the trip, since Vegas tends to be a beer wasteland. I went up to my room, drank my beer, (I absolutely LOVE being able to carry a bottle of beer anywhere I want. Drink in the elevator, in the hallway, anywhere, it doesn't matter. Vegas rules!) read some, and basically crashed. Booom, out. Two hours later it was 6pm, and Mikey woke me up so we could go see, um, whatever the hell that new Arnie movie is called. Collateral Damage? Yeah, that sounds right. Anyway, I used to love Schwartzeneggar movies, but they've sucked ass lately. This one was little better. I do have to say the theaters attached to casinos in Vegas are *very* comfy. Stadium seating, big comfy chairs, it was nice. The movie was just crazy dumb. Oh well. After the movie they decide they're hungry. I'm still 100% full from lunch, so I just watch 'em get some grub from the food court. We decide we want some beer, and pick the Stratosphere upper lounge as our destination. The Stratosphere is a 1150' tower, with a bunch of bars and wedding chapels and a rollercoaster on top. The view of The Strip from over 1000' is spectacular. The Luxor has this 87 gazillion candlepower beam that shines straight up from the peak into the night sky, it's unbelieveable. Apparentlly jets all across the southwest use that as a nagivational point. Holy glub. We got kicked out of that joint around 1am, and the gang was whining about needing sleep since we had to fly home the next day. Mikey always manages to pull the worst possible flight schedules out of his ass. This time he had a 9am flight, which means he had to be at the freakin' airport at like 7am. Crickey. I finally went to bed at 3am, leaving Corey playing mini-bacarrat. When I woke up the next day, Corey was at it again. He's a bacarrat-playin' machine. Apparently the night before he'd gotten cleaned out of $500. He was playin' $25 a hand, and if he won, he'd let it ride, and if he won again, he'd pull $25 leaving $75, basically slowly growing his bet until his winning streak ended. Anyway an asian guy sits down, buys in for $10,000, and starts making $1000 bets opposite to what Corey is doing. He starts winning bigtime, and turns to Corey, smiles, and says, "I eat your luck". Holy crap what an asshole! Finally we hook up with Sean again and I talk 'em into going back to Arizona Charlies. I repeat my lunch of the day before, which was my last meal. That much food pretty happily lasts me 24 hours. After lunch it's basically time to drop me off at the airport for my flight home. Ok, maybe it sounds boring, but I had a kick ass time. I was laughing my ass off the whole time, had a beer anywhere I was, saw cool things, hung out with some friends I rarely get to spend much time with.
Last night was busy.
We've got new renters moving into our rental house soon, so immediately after work we went up to Sears to buy some paint to repaint one of the rooms, and then went down to Home Despot to buy some new electric outlet coverplates and a lightswitch coverplate which the last renters mysteriously took with them, plus a new lockset for the front door. Then we raced home to feed Isabel. She's had a cold recently, and when she's sick she doesn't eat much, but today she chowed down her bananabelly cereal (mashed naners and rice cereal) like she was starving. She now gets whole frozen peas reheated, she picks them up and chows them down. She probably ate a quarter cup of them. Then for dessert she got some sliced cheddar. She loves it. I learned to not give her tooo much, one time I gave her a huge amount and while she chowed it down, she was miserably constipated the next day. Too much binding agent. My poor plugged-up daughter. Note to self: Don't feed the baby too much cheese, and if I do, give her lots of grape juice. While I was feeding Isabel Bridget made us a tasty quick dinner of grilled pastrami on rye sandwiches. Mmm! I barely had a chance to finish mine when it was time to head over to my friend Sean's place. Sean and I have been friends since the sixth grade. I owe his wife Whende bigtime labor since she helped me with my total kitchen remodel on my rental house three years ago. (This was before I'd moved, I would not have put that kind of work into it if I'd have known...). They were finishing off their basement and wanted me to help with the electrical and phone wiring. Their basement now has bare stud walls everywhere that Whende had put up, but they hadn't put any effort into making an electrical plan. Sean could do it but didn't feel like thinking, so I took a big sheet of paper and made a map of the basement, then starting planning circuits for lights and outlets. They've got basically four rooms down there, a laundry room, a new bathroom, a large room they plan to make an A/V room and put in a bigscreen TV, and a new bedroom. (It won't be a legal bedroom, there is no egress window. At least here in Seattle, you have to have a window that opens large enough to crawl out of to make a legal bedroom) When all was said and done, we'll need to install six new 20amp circuit s to feed 27 outlets, 23 light fixtures, and a bathroom ceiling fan/light/heater combo fixture. That's going to be an assload of wiring. Uff-da. I barely got the plan done when they had to leave to go see Ann and Nancy Wilson playing as Heart at the Moore theater, and I took off to home. Bridget's mom was up for the weekend, and after we put Isabel to sleep she babysat for us. We went out for drinks at the GBB Bar, (Good Better Best, I think they should have stuck with merely good, they were not better let alone best!) with our friends Sarah and Mike. Sarah is an old friend from college, she met her husband Mike in law school. They lived in NYC until they moved here last year. As lawyers they work crazy hours, like 12-14 hours a day six days a week, and 6-8 hours on sundays. The grind you have to go through for years if you want to make partner. I love it when bars have copper sheet wrapped tabletops. It's just so cool. I had three pints of Guinness in honor of Sunday, as did Mike. Bridget and Sarah, as pregnant and wannabe pregnant ladies, ordered ice cream. The bar had some handmade double-cream madagascar vanilla that was pretty good, but not nearly as impressive as the number of adjectives make it sound. A bite of nilla ice cream and a swig of Guinness is an awesome combo, however. I was very dissapointed this morning that I forgot to tell anyone to "Beware!" yesterday. Friday, March 15, 2002
Bridget had had Jennifer and her daughter Libby over to play with Isabel.
Bridget: "So Jennifer's husband Patrick is a Quaker" Eric: "Oh really? Huh. I wouldn't have guessed that." B: "Oh! No no, not a QUAKER, but a guy who plays Quake." E: "Ah! Ha! That's funny" B: "yeah, he wants to go to QuakeCon this year" E: "Holy glub! That's hard core. I wouldn't have guessed anyone over 22 would go to that." PS: Yeah, I suck. I need to write things down as they happen. Odds of posting the vegas story look grim. Thursday, March 07, 2002
Monday, March 04, 2002
Friday at work was crazy. Some stuff happened that I can't go into, but I ended up at work until 7:30pm. Bridget and I were going to go out to a movie Friday night, but we missed the start time so we just went out bar-hopping. It was fun, something we haven't done in a long time.
Saturday morning alka-seltzer saved my bacon like it always does. Mmmm! It was a gorgeous sunny weekend, and with both my sister-in-law and mother-in-law staying with us, we decided to go to the Zoo. We strolled around, saw the elefants, saw the Komodo dragons, had fun. As we were leaving, I noticed on the map there was an exhibit I hadn't seen ever before, because it's way the hell in the northwest corner behind the pony ring. It was prairie dogs. They were cute lil buggers. I immediately thought of Johnny Payphone. Saturday afternoon we went to a baby shower for a friend of mine who recently adopted. That lil girl was so tiny! Isabel has been eating like a pig lately, and has *seriously* fattened up! The house where it was held was one of those rectangular "modern" ones that I don't like, and to make matters worse, you had to remove your shoes. I freakin' *hate* that. I am sorry, don't freakin' buy white carpet. Wear socks or slippers if you like, but don't force your weirdness upon guests. Goin' to Vegas tonight! Woooo! Friday, March 01, 2002
Yesterday we took Isabel in for her 9 month checkup. She's a whoppin' 30" long and 21lbs, which put her in the 99th percentile for height and 80th percentile for weight. She's also off the scale on head diameter, big ole grape like her poppa. She got another hep-B shot, didn't cry or fuss about it at all. Such a trooper.
She's crawling better now, still has a bad case of what I call dork-foot, she'll be in crawling position, move her hands forward, one knee forward, then she'll pull her other leg forward and straighten it out so the whole thing points forward, which causes problems. It's like she's deploying her air brake. crawl crawl crawl DOH! Half the time when she does it she falls back onto her butt into a sitting position, then acts like she meant to and "oh I didn't *really* want that toy 2' away, i was just crawling this way for no reason" B made a tasty dinner last night, shrimp creole. During Mardi Gras she watched and episode of Emeril and some guest chef had cooked it. Damn tasty. |
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