The pork loin I bought to grill for the Tropical Depression party was inexplicably and impressively spoiled already when I thawed it. That seems to have been the only hitch in an otherwise fantastically successful day of facilitating fun. Predictably, I bought too much ice and liquor. The Spam sliders were a hit; I probably should have made at least twice as many of those, but there were time constraints.
Jim was the last guest to leave, about 12 hours after the party started, and I managed to pace myself well enough to lock the doors and shut off the crock-pot when he left, though admittedly not well enough to avoid what competitive eaters term an "unfortunate reversal of fortune" in Stevie's car on the way to Champlin the next morning for Birthday Dinner with the family. Shrimp and Macadamia nuts are a poor substitute for the stomach-insulating qualities of complex carbohydrates. Loco Moco next year, I think. The decorations are still up, and I think the success of the party dictates a repeat performance. This is the new Tax Return Barbecue, kids.
The party served as a de facto house-warming, with a handful of guests making their first visit to the Owned Home. Ian and Jessica were suitably impressed, and Ella, my real estate agent finally picked up the glass-and-brass atrocities that used to be my kitchen and living room light fixtures, to be refurbished and sold at her her vintage store. Apparently that look is coming back into fashion. And with it, one assumes, comes an upswing in the demand for either cocaine or General Tso's chicken.
Renae did a yeoman's job of mingling with my purported-to-be-insular-and-unwelcoming social circle, in spite of having only what remained of my focused attention after hosting responsibilities, a handful of Dos Equis and an admittedly ill-considered Long Island around midnight.
Ian asked about the dime on the floor of my parents' downstairs bathroom. It's weird that I immediately knew what he was talking about.
The decor is cheerful, but since the party comprised the bulk of my discretionary income for the coming weeks, I will be leaning into the cold, dull routine of winter, and I'll need my stark white walls for that. If it were just me, I might leave the 5000K daylight-equivalent bulbs in their sockets, but even if it takes all day and a stepstool, I'm sure Stevie will be having none of that. They definitely make photos of food unappetizing.
While the dinner was yesterday, today is properly my mom's birthday. Happy birthday, Mom! She is 58. I looked up the date and number in Wikipedia for an interesting fact to share and came up mostly dry. 58 is the atomic number of cerium.
I think I might have a bowl of cerium for dinner again.*
Except that the only milk in my house was finally thrown away while cleaning for the party, having expired some time in early January.
*This is the kind of wordplay that I, as a tedious pedant, sometimes find annoying, because the words only sound the same because they share an etymological root, but what do you want from me, Internet, it's still Monday morning.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Friday, February 20, 2015
Tropic of... what? Pisces? Is that the fish one? When does that start?
I've been saying for years that I was going to have a tropical themed party in February, and I've never managed to get my proverbial lime in one coconut to get the idea off the ground. That ends tomorrow. Or, in 20 hours, to be more precise. The night will be spent slicing pork products and marinating shrimp skewers, after a trip to the grocery store for Various Fruits. People eat fruit, right? 'Sgot vitamins. Party starts at 3pm; you're gonna need some sugar in your blood if you want to keep the party going to a respectable hour. Eat the damn fruit.
Work has become even more of a tedious, lucrative blur than usual the past few weeks. They tell me they anticipate employees in my position having more free time in the future, and they'll be assigning us "coaching" to do, which basically means listening to other people do their jobs and telling them how to do it better. I'm not complaining or anything, but I really like saying, "I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job or anything…" and it seems like that will make that sentence harder to utter with a straight face. I ain't mad. I wasn't that attached to my straight face.
I got a raise this week. Ask me what I'm going to do with an extra $0.36 per hour…
You might be asking, "Dan! Multiple blog posts in one week? From whence the sudden burst of literary ambition?" I guess the short answer is that telling short old stories to new people made me remember that my old blog existed, which in turn reminded me that my new blog exists. I think the last post on my Live Journal that wasn't a Russian Spambot was from Ian telling me that if I wasn't going to update my blog anymore, I was supposed to call him weekly with stories, and I seem to have missed a few hundred weeks.
I also don't really have stories, but an afternoon reading my Live Journal suggests the possibility that I never really DID have exceptionally interesting stories. The amount of time I devoted to writing about tacos and naps in 2003 is downright astounding.
There are 40s in the long-term forecast. There's every reason to believe we're all going to get out of this winter alive, but you should come to my party just in case.
Work has become even more of a tedious, lucrative blur than usual the past few weeks. They tell me they anticipate employees in my position having more free time in the future, and they'll be assigning us "coaching" to do, which basically means listening to other people do their jobs and telling them how to do it better. I'm not complaining or anything, but I really like saying, "I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job or anything…" and it seems like that will make that sentence harder to utter with a straight face. I ain't mad. I wasn't that attached to my straight face.
I got a raise this week. Ask me what I'm going to do with an extra $0.36 per hour…
You might be asking, "Dan! Multiple blog posts in one week? From whence the sudden burst of literary ambition?" I guess the short answer is that telling short old stories to new people made me remember that my old blog existed, which in turn reminded me that my new blog exists. I think the last post on my Live Journal that wasn't a Russian Spambot was from Ian telling me that if I wasn't going to update my blog anymore, I was supposed to call him weekly with stories, and I seem to have missed a few hundred weeks.
I also don't really have stories, but an afternoon reading my Live Journal suggests the possibility that I never really DID have exceptionally interesting stories. The amount of time I devoted to writing about tacos and naps in 2003 is downright astounding.
There are 40s in the long-term forecast. There's every reason to believe we're all going to get out of this winter alive, but you should come to my party just in case.
Monday, February 16, 2015
More red flags than the Revolution of 1848.
Is "Soviet Laundry Corps" funnier?
I don't really care; I'm done reading the Wikipedia article on red flags for today.
So, anyway, Internet, remember when I used to go on dates with girls and post about it on a blog? Well, I recently started doing one of those things again, and figured I might as well do the other, too.
I've actually been on a handful of one-off Internet dates since I resumed paying attention to my now-decade-old OKCupid account. A quick recap goes something like this:
1) Mostly asked her out because she seemed like a sure "Yes", remembered why we don't aim low.
2) Date went mostly okay, but not well enough for either of us to contact the other again.
3) Met at the CC Club, drank one drink and parted ways, got a message indicating things were not "sparky." Didn't really need the rejection letter after one 45-minute date, but courtesy is nice, I guess?
4) Black Forest with a short girl with 900 Facebook friends and a hangover. Mostly went because she messaged me out of pure curiosity, presumably at not already knowing me? Probably not a "date."
5) CC Club for early afternoon drinks, this time with my own hangover. Mostly a "meeting a like-minded weirdo" meeting, but had a really good time and shared chilli fries. Drove her home to save a bus fare, handshake.
6) Jimmy's on a Sunday night. Weird scene. Lots in common on paper. Talked mostly about cooking. Sort of seemed like a conversation I would have with a co-worker while standing outside during a fire evacuation.
Which brings us back to #5...
We kept messaging back and forth through OKCupid, and eventually exchanged Gchat information. We're not fundamentally similar people, but we're amenable to each other's unfamiliarities, and she doesn't seem intensely proud or protective of the things about her that would concern or even just annoy me about someone newly met. There's an archetype of a girl you might remember from your 20s... The kind of girl who Comes From Circumstances (which, for those of you not up on your geography, is usually in Florida), and generally lives in a swirling shit-storm of chaos and bad life choices. Well, this girl is relatively freshly out of her 20s, and it seems like most of those life choices weren't hers; she just lacked the foresight or upbringing or cold Scandinavian detachment from the misery those around her to grimace and sidle out of the path of other people's bad decisions.
None of this apologia is to imply anything about "long term prospects" (the lady seems not a whit interested in being prospected in any case), but only to explain why she doesn't, in the immediate term, trigger the proximity defense alarm I had installed to warn of the approach of an Elise, or Sarah, or Laura, or, or, or...
It's enough to tip the scale from "toxic disaster" to just "in a transitional phase." When I was 30, I was living in my parents' basement and was freshly out of a fairly disastrous relationship.
We've gone out (or stayed in, as inclinations dictated) a couple times since. We spent most of the weekend together. I used think of dating as largely a means of promoting self-improvement. But seeing as how, in the intervening years since I spent much time at it, I've become a home-owner with a steady job and a 401k who washes forks before I'm out of clean ones, I guess now, if nothing else, it's nice to have a reason to make Hollandaise sauce from scratch. As often as I speak aloud the words "Who am I trying to impress?", it's pretty much never as an explanation of something awesome I was doing; it's usually like, why I was eating cereal for dinner?
Actually, cereal sounds good, but that's neither here nor there.
I don't really care; I'm done reading the Wikipedia article on red flags for today.
So, anyway, Internet, remember when I used to go on dates with girls and post about it on a blog? Well, I recently started doing one of those things again, and figured I might as well do the other, too.
I've actually been on a handful of one-off Internet dates since I resumed paying attention to my now-decade-old OKCupid account. A quick recap goes something like this:
1) Mostly asked her out because she seemed like a sure "Yes", remembered why we don't aim low.
2) Date went mostly okay, but not well enough for either of us to contact the other again.
3) Met at the CC Club, drank one drink and parted ways, got a message indicating things were not "sparky." Didn't really need the rejection letter after one 45-minute date, but courtesy is nice, I guess?
4) Black Forest with a short girl with 900 Facebook friends and a hangover. Mostly went because she messaged me out of pure curiosity, presumably at not already knowing me? Probably not a "date."
5) CC Club for early afternoon drinks, this time with my own hangover. Mostly a "meeting a like-minded weirdo" meeting, but had a really good time and shared chilli fries. Drove her home to save a bus fare, handshake.
6) Jimmy's on a Sunday night. Weird scene. Lots in common on paper. Talked mostly about cooking. Sort of seemed like a conversation I would have with a co-worker while standing outside during a fire evacuation.
Which brings us back to #5...
We kept messaging back and forth through OKCupid, and eventually exchanged Gchat information. We're not fundamentally similar people, but we're amenable to each other's unfamiliarities, and she doesn't seem intensely proud or protective of the things about her that would concern or even just annoy me about someone newly met. There's an archetype of a girl you might remember from your 20s... The kind of girl who Comes From Circumstances (which, for those of you not up on your geography, is usually in Florida), and generally lives in a swirling shit-storm of chaos and bad life choices. Well, this girl is relatively freshly out of her 20s, and it seems like most of those life choices weren't hers; she just lacked the foresight or upbringing or cold Scandinavian detachment from the misery those around her to grimace and sidle out of the path of other people's bad decisions.
None of this apologia is to imply anything about "long term prospects" (the lady seems not a whit interested in being prospected in any case), but only to explain why she doesn't, in the immediate term, trigger the proximity defense alarm I had installed to warn of the approach of an Elise, or Sarah, or Laura, or, or, or...
It's enough to tip the scale from "toxic disaster" to just "in a transitional phase." When I was 30, I was living in my parents' basement and was freshly out of a fairly disastrous relationship.
We've gone out (or stayed in, as inclinations dictated) a couple times since. We spent most of the weekend together. I used think of dating as largely a means of promoting self-improvement. But seeing as how, in the intervening years since I spent much time at it, I've become a home-owner with a steady job and a 401k who washes forks before I'm out of clean ones, I guess now, if nothing else, it's nice to have a reason to make Hollandaise sauce from scratch. As often as I speak aloud the words "Who am I trying to impress?", it's pretty much never as an explanation of something awesome I was doing; it's usually like, why I was eating cereal for dinner?
Actually, cereal sounds good, but that's neither here nor there.
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