wasting time, kosher restaurants, and other brushes with fame
Yesterday and today have been extremely nice here in good ol' Pittsburgh, up around 60 degrees and relatively clear out and all. Figuring that it was the last nice days of the year, I wanted to walk to Oakland and get cheap chinese food at Szechuan Express and awesome ice cream at Dave and Andy's. Unfortunately, ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dvarin was silly and ate snacks at a time that made dinner at my hungry time inconvenient for him. So I went to Squirrel Hill with my zephyr friends to try out a new Kosher restaurant that Corey is really into.
It's called "Milky Way" and it's down on Murray near where all of the kosher restaurants are. It's a "dairy and vegetarian" place. Now, keep in mind that I don't think I've ever in my life had a really delicious kosher meal that wasn't cooked by either my mom or my paternal grandmother. So I didn't have very high expectations. Which is just as well, because the food I got (eggplant parmesan) was pretty mediocre. I think they intend this place to be a hangout for kids, though, and it was pretty full of random neighborhood Jewish kids.
However, here is the odd thing. So we had a group of ten people. At this place, you go up and order at the counter and they bring you food eventually. The thing is, they asked some people to pay in advance and then some of us actually had to go up there after getting our food to go "Hi, I haven't paid, will you please take my money?" Although most of us were good about it, one guy in our group actually did forget to pay. And it's not like there was much they did to really prevent that.
But at any rate, Corey brought Frank along to dinner. Frank is Corey's SO and a (world-)famous crossword puzzle writer. I've actually done several of his crosswords and other puzzles in Games magazine and the NYTimes and such. So it was sort of like meeting a celebrity, except that let's face it, most people don't notice the names of the authors of the puzzles they do. So when I told the guys I did today's NYTimes crossword with at work about it, I said "I met the guy who did yesterday's crossword at dinner yesterday!" rather than "I met Frank Longo yesterday," 'cause they'd be like "Who the heck is that?" So the thing is, Corey and Frank brought a bunch of puzzles and stuff to dinner, but I wasn't really in the mood for doing puzzles, so I spent most of my time talking to Dave and Charlie and Kevin and all. Alex, too, until he defected to the puzzle side of the table. I lent him "Mink Car", the new TMBG album, which I haven't been all that enamored with.
After dinner I came back to work in the hopes of finishing more of our "homework", but to be honest, the problem is that I don't really have a good enough ML background to do a lot of the more complicated stuff. Oh well. I gave up and went home, and played DDR for an hour or so, and went through the Velfarre 2000 routine in PPP a few times. Afterwards I played Simcity 3000 for "just a few minutes".
Let's face it, there is no such thing as playing Simcity for "just a few minutes". Around 2am I think I gave up because Eli had turned out the lights and was telling me to go to sleep already.
I really think I'm sort of regressing into one of my introverted periods of time where despite other people being around, I'm entirely too focused within rather than without. I sort of just want to do the things that are floating around in my head. The problem is that when I get into a mindset like this, I don't entirely know how to get out of it. It's like I wish I could split myself into two parts so I could do all the stuff I want to and still have time to spend with Eli so he won't be neglected.
Bleh.
dvarin was silly and ate snacks at a time that made dinner at my hungry time inconvenient for him. So I went to Squirrel Hill with my zephyr friends to try out a new Kosher restaurant that Corey is really into.It's called "Milky Way" and it's down on Murray near where all of the kosher restaurants are. It's a "dairy and vegetarian" place. Now, keep in mind that I don't think I've ever in my life had a really delicious kosher meal that wasn't cooked by either my mom or my paternal grandmother. So I didn't have very high expectations. Which is just as well, because the food I got (eggplant parmesan) was pretty mediocre. I think they intend this place to be a hangout for kids, though, and it was pretty full of random neighborhood Jewish kids.
However, here is the odd thing. So we had a group of ten people. At this place, you go up and order at the counter and they bring you food eventually. The thing is, they asked some people to pay in advance and then some of us actually had to go up there after getting our food to go "Hi, I haven't paid, will you please take my money?" Although most of us were good about it, one guy in our group actually did forget to pay. And it's not like there was much they did to really prevent that.
But at any rate, Corey brought Frank along to dinner. Frank is Corey's SO and a (world-)famous crossword puzzle writer. I've actually done several of his crosswords and other puzzles in Games magazine and the NYTimes and such. So it was sort of like meeting a celebrity, except that let's face it, most people don't notice the names of the authors of the puzzles they do. So when I told the guys I did today's NYTimes crossword with at work about it, I said "I met the guy who did yesterday's crossword at dinner yesterday!" rather than "I met Frank Longo yesterday," 'cause they'd be like "Who the heck is that?" So the thing is, Corey and Frank brought a bunch of puzzles and stuff to dinner, but I wasn't really in the mood for doing puzzles, so I spent most of my time talking to Dave and Charlie and Kevin and all. Alex, too, until he defected to the puzzle side of the table. I lent him "Mink Car", the new TMBG album, which I haven't been all that enamored with.
After dinner I came back to work in the hopes of finishing more of our "homework", but to be honest, the problem is that I don't really have a good enough ML background to do a lot of the more complicated stuff. Oh well. I gave up and went home, and played DDR for an hour or so, and went through the Velfarre 2000 routine in PPP a few times. Afterwards I played Simcity 3000 for "just a few minutes".
Let's face it, there is no such thing as playing Simcity for "just a few minutes". Around 2am I think I gave up because Eli had turned out the lights and was telling me to go to sleep already.
I really think I'm sort of regressing into one of my introverted periods of time where despite other people being around, I'm entirely too focused within rather than without. I sort of just want to do the things that are floating around in my head. The problem is that when I get into a mindset like this, I don't entirely know how to get out of it. It's like I wish I could split myself into two parts so I could do all the stuff I want to and still have time to spend with Eli so he won't be neglected.
Bleh.