I know many readers are waiting for a recap of the trip this weekend, so here goes nothing. I’ll try not to glaze over any important details, but I’m sure if I do and will fill in the blanks.
We left Boston around 8am, and hauled ass, stopped at Don Pablo’s in Rochester for Queso and lunch, and then got back on the road. I missed an exit in Buffalo and had to do a quick turnaround, but our border crossing was uneventful. Once we were in Canada, however, things got messy. The short version is that we ended up going east instead of west. Names omitted to protect the innocent, lets just say things went bad. Unfortunately, this meant that we went 30 miles in the wrong direction during rush hour. This really killed the good time we were making. Corinna took over driving and decided to prove that Chuck Yeager is a pussy and put the pedal to the medal. We arrived at Amy and Andy’s around 11pm, drained but managing to drink and chat until 3am. I apparently passed test one, meeting the first bit of family, but was still nervous about meeting her folks in the morning. As an aside, the Raz’s dogs are crazy…. :)
After a bit of sleep, we woke up around 8 or 9am and got all prim-and-proper like before going to Corinna’s parents’ house. Ok, so by “prim-and-proper” I mean “no swear words on my t-shirt”, but hell, my standards are a bit different from the norm. :) We drive like 15 minutes and her ‘rents are missing.. After some “set to silent” confusion they came over and we ate brunch. I wasn’t thrown out of the house or anything, so I guess I did OK… We then went to Corinna’s brother, Tom’s workshop. He was very busy putting the finishing touches on his latest work to take to Mythic Journeys where he is a featured artist. We also screened Midnight Zombie Maniacs for Coco’s fam, and everyone liked it… We helped Tom put together his Minerva, which was pretty cool. His work is amazing… I wish I had the ability to translate the noise in my head into something tangible.
After leaving Tom’s we went bike shopping for , and she ended up getting some kind of comfort bike from TRU. Fortunately it fit in Hawkeye, so we were able to bring it back to Boston. Paul and Amber met us for dinner at the house and then we saw Shrek 2, which I wasn’t really expecting to like, as I am not usually into animated films. There were some funny parts, but as a whole it was pretty ho-hum. That’s just my opinion, though, and since everyone wanted to see it and seemed to enjoy it, I just kept my snobby mouth shut. :)
Sunday the two of us went to Paul’s house, which is the house that Corinna grew up in. It was a neat house, and it was cool seeing all the mods that Coco’s father had put in there. We didn’t stay very long, but Paul and Amber were coming out for the barbeque the next day.. After seeing the house, we went to visit one of Corinna’s friends in Ann Arbor. Her friend has two kids, one 4 and one 12, so I was on “distract the kids so we can talk” detail… I went style acting like a spastic toddler in the back yard while they caught up. We also went to this diner which was pretty cool. There was a goth kid sitting in the back with a Skinny Puppy shirt and LPD pin… I kept looking at him, I was dressed pretty nerdy, so he probably thought I was judging him or something… He was surprised when I started talking to him about the new SP album… :)
After our visit was finished, we headed to Coco’s parents new house (they are trying to sell the other) which is kinda close to Ann Arbor. It is this really tiny one-bedroom place set on 5 acres of land. They have plans to renovate and expand, but not until the old place is off their hands. Anyway, we went to dinner at this local place, Stivers. It was divey, but I’ve never been known to turn my nose up at a divey place. I ordered Roast Beef and a Jack and Coke. I think the Coke was there just for color, because the drink was REALLY strong. Afterwards the four of us tried to decide on a PPV movie, but Coco’s stepdad just wanted to watch the Pistons game.
We slept on the floor, which was kinda difficult because it was a cement floor.. At some point that night I started bouncing Croc Hunter impressions off of Kim, cracking up Coco’s mom. After her parents woke up they traded us the living room for their bed, so I got in a few good hours of sleep. We then headed to Ann Arbor to drop something off at the same friends house and run some errands for her mom, who was preparing for the big Memorial Day barbeque. The barbeque was alot of fun, there were 8 of us (4 of us Amy, Andy, Paul, and Amber), and there was tons of great food and drink. Some bogo-pictionary was played, where I spent most of my time just guessing random words loudly. I even cracked up Paul at some point, which was apparently a big deal. Eventually everyone had to split, including Corinna and I who were staying at A&A’s that night so we had a bit of an easier trip back to MA Tuesday morning. Goodbye’s were exchanged and Hawkeye growled. We shot some hoops when we got back to A&A’s, watched some South Park and other bad television, and eventually went to bed.
The trip back to MA was pretty uneventful… We stopped halfway in Rochester for some Schaller’s, and made it back to MA in about 12 hours, which is pretty much on the money of what was predicted.
Poker last night, with the guys from work, was fun. My 3rd hand I more than doubled up my 5 bucks with a 4 of a kind… I wish I could say it was magical play or something, but you simply don’t get a hand like that very often, and when you do it’s hard not to make money. I ended the night up 6 bucks (which is pretty good given my \$5 buy-in). On the way home from Garrett’s I finally had the chance to go over the Zakim bridge, which is so, so nice. When I got back to the apartment and hung out with … Or, more accurately, chit-chat with her when American Idol wasn’t commanding her attention. :P
Finishing stuff up at work today in preparation for the big trip tomorrow. Corinna and I are going to stop by a BPL branch tonight to see if we can find a good audiobook for the trip tomorrow… Otherwise I will probably just score one off of Audible.com which is super-duper. The drive is going to suck, but whatever, the time in MI should be fun.
I remember having a conversation with someone recently where they were mocking my fear of clowns. You can laugh all you want, but when I read articles like this I feel justified.
I pulled an unusual move this morning and hit the snooze button… Now, I don’t quite understand this but I got to work pretty much the same time as usual, even though I slept an extra 15 minutes. And on top of that, I felt like I was dragging a bit this morning, less Speedy Gonzales and more Sleep Dwarf. But whatever… I took out for dinner at Legal last night, which was nice. I got their Wild Salmon which was fantastic, but the Cheddar & Jalapeno polenta I got on the side was pretty crappy… The jalapenos were overwhelming and the whole thing kinda tasted like crappy nacho cheese from the movie theater.
I installed mfs_ftp onto the Tivo last night so I could pull some Good Eats episodes that had been building up on there. Since I used to do all of my Good Eats -> Divx processing on my PC, things have been building up on my Tivo. Now that I have tons of disk space available in the Mac I figured I would use it to free up some space on the Tivo.
I fixed my stereo last night… I soldered and heat-shrinked all of the connections in the harness, so they should be solid now. The bonus was that I was able to get the head unit out of it’s DIN cabinet without disassembling the whole dash. :) The un-bonus is that I managed to “decorate” ’s kitchen table with 3 small burn marks from the iron. I put down protection but apparently it wasn’t good enough… It probably doesn’t help that I am a soldering tard and it takes me forever for each connection.
I think this trip to Detroit coming up will be my last car trip for awhile… Or, at least my last weekend long dealie. I am just getting really burned out on travel and whatnot. Call me a homebody, but as much as I love seeing friends, etc, I also really enjoy being lazy in the apartment all weekend. :)
Got back from the Rochester trip around 1am last night, and managed to piss off by not calling to tell her I would be home so late. I thought I had mentioned to her that I was going to be late when I called on Saturday, but I was somewhat stunted and I guess I wasn’t very clear. I had a great time this weekend, but the trip to Rochester is such a killer… Corinna didn’t want to go to Rochester because of the trip to 8 Mile next weekend, thinking it was too much travel for such a short time period. She was right, I was wrong.
Adam and I unleashed a horrible menace upon this planet over the weekend. At the party on Saturday, it was determined that poker needed to be played, but we didn’t have any chips. Instead we played with alcohol. Let it be said that this abomination is pure evil and I personally apologize for its creation.
My left front speaker dropped out on the ride to work this morning, probably another bad connection in the wiring harness.. I guess I will have to take the dash apart again to fix it, I think this time I am just pulling the whole harness out and soldering the two sides together (of the harness, it came in two halves; one for the car’s connector and the other to fit the radio) instead of using butt connectors.
I’m going to Rochester this weekend, but the plans are terribly vague. All the detail I have is that we are leaving when gets home from work. I’m not even sure if we have secured a place to stay. One thing I do know, however, is that there will be Nick’s this weekend. :)
I apologize in advance for the impending hand-waving, but…. you know
I’ve been working on two different projects here at work, about 50% of my time on each. There has been a roadblock (out of my control) that was finally lifted today and now I can really rev up the engines. I guess, actually, road block is improper, because I was able to move ahead before, just terribly slowly. And it only took 2.5 months!
and I are currently trying an experiement: We will only eat fast food once a month. Well, not quite: Salads and deli-sandwiches aren’t lumped in there, but that kind of food isn’t really apropos to the experiment anyway. We are really focusing on trying to eliminate the scourge of french fries, burgers, etc from our diet… It’s not so much the fries or the burgers that are the problem, but more of what goes into them at a fast-food restaurant. I am starting to make a consious shift to avoiding High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Trans-Fats, but it’s a pretty monumental challenge. I haven’t really made a determination as to whether or not these two products are actually bad for me, but humans got along without them fine for eons before their invention, so I don’t really see why they should be part of my diet.
Last night after work I headed over to a Barbeque at the co-op-clan’s house, drank too much, and ended up sleeping on the couch. I had a dentist appointment this morning to fix a broken filling, which sucked ass. I am kind of coasting a bit today, but I’m being sufficiently productive.
Congrats to all the gay/lesbian couples that were married today! Hopefully they can continue to do so from this date on.
I saw Spellbound (1945) last night with the movie club, and it was fantastic. I could have sworn I had seen it before, but didn’t remember the plot at all, so I’m not so sure.