Well here I was thinking we'd have yet another year without any snow of consequence. I woke up this morning before sunrise, and began performing my usual ritual… the zombie-like shuffle downstairs to the life-giver (coffee maker) and the sustenance (a bowl of cereal)… carry these precious items upstairs to the think-maker (computer) to read news, emails, etc… when I get a call from my Mom asking if Kelly had left for work yet. I said "uh, no" and she replies with "good, it's a mess out there" … I glance out into the dark towards a street light and see snow falling. Already at 6:50am it's accumulated enough for me to discern the lighter-than-normal ground outside. Another hour later it's still coming down strong and the area is bright white with snow. Kelly and I, after watching some news of cars sliding around and trucks jack-knifing, decided to work from home. We got a little over 3 inches of snow. Pretty stuff, and happy to see it. This is the first time we've had a real snow since we moved into our house. I'd love it if it snowed more, but it's apparently going to warm up a bit and melt off over the rest of the week. Oh well, enjoy it while it lasts. 🙂
Category: General
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Snow!
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Delta Cafe and Horse Brass Pub
Tonight Kelly and I joined Snooks & 'L', and Miranda & Brian at the great southern style 'home cooking' restaurant near Reed College, the Delta Cafe. Holy moly is the food good, and not super expensive. For $9.00 or so, I got a dish of meat loaf with gravy, a side of mashed potatos and another side of red beans and rice with pork (you can pick two side dishes for every main entree). Oh, and I also got to try some of an appetizer Snooks ordered, spicy meatballs. Mmmmmm. I will say however, that I felt uncomfortably full at the end of the meal, and all I had to drink was a little water. But it is really delicious food. Go, now!After (the very filling) dinner we drove up the street a ways to the fabulous Horse Brass Pub for some beers. Had a great time hanging out and chatting, despite the fact that it was VERY busy. Thanks Snooks for arranging the evening. 🙂
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Back Stage Bar and Talkdemonic show
Tonight Kelly and I met up with our good friend Miranda after work at a new-ish McMenamins pub called Back Stage Bar (named for it's location, behind the Bagdad Theater on SE 37th). The pub hasn't been open for quite a year yet, and was once literally the Bagdad's back stage when it opened in 1927. In the 70's it was converted to a more art house theater, but since McMenamins bought the Bagdad the back stage building has been more or less vacant until last year. When you walk in, you can't help but be awed by the height of the room. Essentially, it's the concrete shell of what looks like a 4 story building, though I could only pick out one missing floor, about 15 feet from the ground, I'm guessing that's the height of the Bagdad stage. It's really very impressive. You can also climb some stairs to two smaller rooms along the street-facing side of the building. There are 5 pool tables and one snooker table, a large bar along one wall, and a dozen or so booths. Aside from the building, the food and drink is what you'd expect from a McMenamins.After dinner we drove over to the Doug Fir to see Talkdemonic play. This was the first time they'd played in a while, what with Lisa Molinaro having joined the Decemberists on tour. Lisa and Miranda are friends so at one point we got to meet her, and had a chat about the Decemberists tour, the future of her with them, etc. It seems that she'll be joining them on another tour sometime soon.
The second opening act was Leti Angel. Fairly good rock trio, though the vocals were pretty rough at times. That said, the male singer (there's a female vocalist and bass player in the band too) would use a sampler effect pedal and add harmonies loop vocal bites (yells, etc), which created some interesting sounds, some of which were really really cool. All in all, worth checking out their MySpace page.
Talkdemonic were, as always, great. I've talked about them before, so I won't go into great detail about them except to say that each time I see them the crowd gets bigger and bigger. They performed a lot of my favorite tracks from their albums, some of which were slightly re-worked, or Lisa would play her parts different, which was nice to hear it sound fresh… and they also performed a lot of new material, which was fantastic. More pics here and here. -
Happy Snooksday
Happy birthday Snooks! Hopefully I can buy you a beer (or ten) later on today. 🙂
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Blog tweaks
Spent some time tweaking the blog the past couple days, minor modifications and improvements. Registered users will notice that they can now set avatars, and that I fixed a bug that kept the blog from reading the cookie data properly that would cause logged in users to have to fill out the entire comment form, including image verification. There were many plugins I looked at (including more dynamic, AJAX-style commenting), some of which may be coming soon. Yay, nerdy fun! Didn't get much else accomplished around the house this weekend. Oh well. May have to play some Call of Duty 2 now. 🙂
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Beer, with added workiness
Ah, friday. I say that as if it was a long week or something, I only worked 3 days, but they all were long, brain-destroying days. One nice thing was that at the end of the day the company hosted another small happy hour in the break room, so I had a beer or two and chatted before Kelly picked me up around 6:30. We decided to go to the Moon & Sixpence again, have a few pints, some snacks, etc, and relax.
The pub was packed when we arrived, so we ended up with a small table near the door. About an hour later I hear my name called out, it was one of my bosses and his wife. They sat with us and we had a great time chatting, mostly non-work related. Towards the end of the evening my esteemed coworker seemed to be getting a little droopy-eyed, so we drove them home. Fun evening all around, and a good way to end the week.
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It’s 2007!
Happy New Year all. Had a small gathering this evening, loads of fun, ate too much, drank too much… guess that's the point? Overall had a very nice evening, and am looking forward to the new year. Happy New Year and here's to a better '07. (PS, I can't believe that it's 2007… I feel that I should have a flying car, a cold fusion-powered home, and a robot maid by now).
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New computer: built
Continuing on my week of productivity, today I built myself a new PC, a Core 2 Duo, two gigs of DDR2, and an nVidia 7950gt video card. After spending most of the day and evening getting all the hardware and basic software installed, I installed Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (which came with the video card) and Call of Duty 2, and briefly played each one. I will say that after upgrading from an older system, the new one is quite speedy, and while it's fun to have a new machine, it's a big pain reinstalling all the software and getting things set up the way they were prior to the upgrade. I'm guessing it'll take a couple more days to get things set up the way I need, and to back up all the junk from the old hard drive, but it's nice to have a modern system. Oh, and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter is pretty fun. 🙂
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Storage shelf: constructed
Spent the day (and evening) building a monster (and manly) shelf in my garage today. Since moving into the house a year and a half ago, we'd had piled up plastic storage bins on the floor… bothering me. One of the things I mentioned on my Christmas wish list was some tools and assistance building a big shelf a couple feet from the ceiling to place said bins on. I got some tools, and last night my brother Travis came over with his truck so I could pick up lumber and other hardware to build the shelf. Today I got it all built. Took me nearly 7 hours to do from start to finish (not counting all the cleanup) but it's so nice to finally have done. 12 feet wide, nearly 2 feet deep, hanging about 2 feet from the ceiling. I can fit 8 bins on it, and was able to move some other things around under it, freeing up room for the cars. I'd shout out a big hooray, but I'm exhausted. So all I can muster is a weak 'yay'. 🙂
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100 tidbits of knowledge
Reading though my list of usual news sites this morning, I came across this from BBC News: 100 things we didn't know last year. Did you know that the lion costume from Wizard of Oz was made of real lion skins? Did you know that more than 90% of plane crashses have survivors? Fascinating.
