dr4b: (pouty)
Woke up late again, of course, and Oren came over. For lack of any better ideas for lunch, we went to Uwajimaya, where we met up with Zach. I got thai noodles and everyone else got sushi, and we took it all back to Oren's house, where we sat around playing cards for several hours -- first Mhing (a mah-jong card game we hadn't played in aaaaages) and more Tichu, where Carl and I teamed up and actually beat Oren and Zach, thus ending the debate about whether Oren always wins or Deanna always loses.

Because it was a Sunday night, Zach and Oren and Carl and I went to Taste of India. It still amuses me to no end to type a sentence like that, being as we used to have a group of friends back in college who went to the Taste of India restaurant in Pittsburgh every Sunday night. Whee. Carl and I split some matar paneer and I ate too much bread.

Came back here, watched a few episodes of Sledge Hammer, played some 4-player Mario Kart, and then Zach and Oren left. Carl and I stayed up talking for a while, but not too late because he had an early morning flight today, and infact, as I type this he should be in the air somewhere. Bleh, guess I'll see him at Carnival or something.

So, yeah. I'll do new year's resolutions soon, but I should go do some productive-like things today.
dr4b: (Taki)
Whee. Work was like a ghost town today. I went to Taste of India for dinner after work with Zach, who is in town, and his girlfriend Mindy, and Oren. After dinner they came over to my apartment and hung out for a few hours. I went to the airport to pick up Eli after that. His plane was late, so I got to read a bit. Now I am home, and should sleep. The end.
dr4b: (Capture the B34R)
Almost done my Key West entry. Only two weeks later! Woo. I just need to lj-cut it a little and stuff, maybe I can do that during lunch tomorrow.

Yesterday, I played volleyball. I played volleyball really well, as a matter of fact. Well, eh, I couldn't set worth a damn for whatever reason, but my sidearm serves were dead on, and my spiking was beyond fabulous -- every time I jumped up and smacked the ball it went where I wanted it to. Craziness.

Today, I went for Indian food for dinner with Oren, Drew, and Jason. Drew and Jason had holiday gifts for me and I feel inordinately bad since I don't know what to get them. Drew got me a book about Lou Gehrig that I wanted, and Jason got me... um... Jason got me a black hoodie sweatshirt with a Hello-Kitty-and-crossbones on it. I am not making this up, and because I know the first thing you will all say is "JPG!", I have conveniently taken a lousy picture of me with the shirt, and the Chanukah bear that my mom got me, too, for good measure.

The craziness is, the sweatshirt is a size Medium but it actually fits me. Hmm.

Now I am sitting around listening to an old Glay concert videotape and baking cupcakes for D&D and stuff. I wish I knew what I was doing this Sunday. I went from not having any plans to having three separate things I should be doing, and knowing my luck, I will end up doing none. Saturday is Katy's party and a Baseball Prospectus event, and I-Gene showing up in town and crashing on my couch. Excitement.
dr4b: (mariners)
Today was Sunday. I had thought of going to IKEA to get a new wardrobe/dresser, but then the carp bake-off happened on PP (sigh, I really screwed up the second 3 leagues and only got 27 points, the winners were all in the 28-29 range), and my laptop had blue-screened anyway so I was trying to figure out how to fix it. By the time I managed to finish the carp bakeoff and play with the laptop in safe mode a bit and all, it was almost time to go to volleyball, so I gave up and just worked on cleaning the apartment for a little while.

Went to volleyball. There were only 10 people there at the most, so we had a lot of teams of 4 and 5. It was good. Buckley managed to hit the ball into the clock on the wall and knock it down and shatter it. I quipped, "Well, that's ONE way to deal with Daylight Savings Time!" Also, the bossy guy I've mentioned, I played on his team all day, and he "advised" a lot of other people but didn't say a word to me, although we did exchange a bunch of "nice set" and "nice hit" comments and the like. Maybe he's still scared of me.

Oren and I went to get dinner at Taste of India and I burned my tongue on the chai. Argh. Then he came over and took a look at my unhappy laptop and he seems to think the problem is the connection to the hard drive (my laptop was blue screening with kernel panics), since it wouldn't boot when it was on the chair but when Oren picked it up it suddenly worked, and when I placed it on a level surface, it never stopped working. Who knows? I copied off as many of my files as I think were relevant, and I'm going to call HP tomorrow and see if they feel like fixing the thing. I wonder if I should continue to be lazy in replacing my desktop or not. I mean, it's only 4-5 years old, but I think PP really took a toll on it, as did moving it a few times, and the two hard drive failures. I want to get a new monitor sometime anyway. We'll see.

I'm a big dork and just wrote a parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey about Paul DePodesta getting fired. I couldn't help it. I was trying to figure out how else to capture the "Computer geek gets canned as Dodgers GM" angle.
dr4b: (mariners)
[profile] buoren is actually in Seattle. How weird. Planes do that, I guess. Oren picked him up from downtown and we all hung out tonight. Got dinner at Taste of India, hee, and they came by here for a while. Kevin was rightfully cowed by my flock of ducks. I looked through some of my old Japan stuff, and found a 2004 Chiba Lotte Marines pocket schedule. I think I'll carry it around for good luck next week :)

Does anyone in Seattle-land want to get together to watch Game 1 of the Astros-Sox World Series on Saturday? [profile] damienroc, and maybe [personal profile] oren, I'm kind of looking at you here.
dr4b: (mariners)
Yesterday, I went to lunch with [profile] meerkat299 and [profile] georgejas, the latter of whom is in town this weekend but was going off for most of the real weekend to be camping with Megan and whoever. We went to Soup Daddy. They didn't have any of the soups I like. They say I should call and find out when they have the ones I like; I think it'd be more useful if they had like, a soup warning service you could sign up for, like they'd email you in the morning if they had the specific soups you were watching for.

After work, Oren picked me up, and we went to Taste of India for dinner with Nick. We drank a LOT of chai. It ruled.

Watched "Major League" after that - god I love that movie, but I wish it didn't remind me of the Philadelphia Phillies this year. Ryan Howard is Cerrano, David Bell is Rodger Dorn, Mike Lieberthal is Jake Taylor, etc.

Drew and Jason came by as we were finishing the movie, and they played Tichu with me and Nick, since Oren decided to go home. Yay for Tichu!

Today, we went to the east side, and got lunch at Thai Chef with Drew and Jason after an adventure involving Drew getting a flat tire on 520 and stuff. Oops. Played Ticket to Ride over at Drew's place, along with a friend of Nick's (Shaheen? I forget his name). Drew won the game but I completed a metric assload of tickets for 68 points plus my 46 points in tracks. Not too shabby.

I have an Orbital CD to give to Eli, returned from Drew.

Nick and I went to the Mariners game. It sucked. Game review's in the normal place. Tomorrow is Felix. We will be there. Oh yes, we will be there.
dr4b: (mariners)
Today I went to the Angels-Mariners game with Oren. We saw [personal profile] jcreed playing center field and kicking butt! He was really good. You should have seen this awesome running catch he made in the 6th inning.



The Mariners at least only lost this game by one run. I'll spare you guys the details; it'll be in the usual spot if you want to read my baseball writing, as you know. Though, I will link for the benefit of Bayani and Megan, the coolest picture of Jason Kendall ever.

After the game, Oren and I hung out and watched the Cardinals-Cubs game on TV for a while, and then decided to go up to Taste of India for dinner, where I discovered something super-awesome: TOI UNLIMITED ICED CHAI! Holy crap, as if it wasn't awesome enough when they have normal hot unlimited chai, they have iced unlimited chai too! Woo.

I was supposed to pick up Josh and Megan from the airport tonight, but they appear to be stranded in Las Vegas. Maybe that means I'll actually go to sleep soon instead, once I finish writing up the game.
dr4b: (mariners)
Oh, um, and for a real update, well, today I hung out with [personal profile] oren. We went to the Mariners-Indians game, which was a real sleeper -- it was just super-hot outside, and I was tired, and the game was pretty boring after the first two innings, which took like an hour. I'd said before the game, "The Indians are going to win," and of course, they did. I think the most exciting thing to happen during the game was when a section a few down from us all got up to sing happy 100th birthday to some lady. I was like, "Wow, she was born at the end of July 1905... that's a long time ago. I mean, like, that's about when Ty Cobb started playing baseball." (for the record: August 30 1905)

Blah blah. Afterwards we went to Oren's place and watched a bit of the White Sox - Orioles game on ESPN. I really just wanted to see Freddy Garcia pitch, but the Sox had to go and bat around the entire lineup in the first inning, so it took like 35 minutes before I got to see the Orioles come up. Apparently the slugfest ended in a 9-4 win for the Sox, though Brian Roberts and Eric Byrnes apparently hit back-to-back solo homers in the 8th, which is cool. (For Byrnes. I still hate the Orioles.)

We didn't see the rest of the game, though, since we watched the first episode of the live-action version of 逮捕しちゃうぞ; it's been about 7-8 years since I saw the anime of that, so I barely remember it except "it has two crazy cop chicks named Natsumi and Miyuki", but the live-action show was actually pretty good; I've always kinda enjoyed Japanese cop sitcoms ever since we all watched 踊る大捜査線 on the international channel back in college. After one episode we went to get dinner of Taste of India. I called Carl and left a message like "Hey Carl, it's Sunday night and Oren and I just watched a dorama and are now going to ToI, wanna come?" Unfortunately, I caught him during Firefly, but we talked later while we were back at Oren's watching another episode of Taiho. Hopefully we'll actually watch all of it eventually, and hopefully Carl will come visit soon!

Then uh, I came back here and wrote another parody song because I am a dork. And now I should sleep or I'll never get up on time.
dr4b: (phantom camera)
Today [personal profile] eub, [profile] mh75, [profile] bhudson and I went to Mount Rainier and hiked all day through the Paradise trails. We saw pretty flowers, huge trees, uppity chipmunks, and occasionally, through the fog, the top of the mountain. I am sure Eli will post pictures at some point -- I took some too, but most of mine were probably not as good as his, although I did get a shot of said uppity chipmunk trying to get into our bags, which was cute. I didn't see any marmots (the others did when they went up a final hill without me), but we did see a lot of deer. They flap their ears! Flap-flap, flap-flap. It's very cute. All the animals on the trail seemed extremely tame, which I suppose isn't that unexpected.

I saw a lot of landforms and plants that reminded me of dragons when we did the Grove of the Patriarchs trail, so "It's a dragon!" sort of became my cheer for the day.

My legs ache, but it was a good day. Afterwards Eli and Benoit and I went to Taste of India and caught up on gossip.
dr4b: (emi)
I've noticed that the more I wish I could stop thinking about something and get it out of my mind, the more I think about it. This sucks.

Today's morning chai came from Simon's or whatever the cafe is called in my work building, because it was raining and I didn't feel like strolling down 4th avenue. It was generic yet again. I'm running out of coffee shops.

Work went well! I think. My brain is still full, I find.

Something I think I forgot to mention, but, my 5th year anniversary of playing DDR passed this week, on July 4th -- the first time I ever played a game of DDR was July 4th, 2000, at Sunnyvale Golfland, on the 1.5 machine, with Tim. I guess maybe one of these days I should go play a game again, but I've been enjoying NOT fucking up my knees and feet for the last few months, so we'll see.

Anyway, after work I ended up skipping the gym because I was there until late enough that I wouldn't catch Heidi and Megan. Oren was coming over and we were going to get dinner, and I had emailed Katy and Seth earlier in the day because I thought Oren would like to talk to Seth about motorcycles and building planes and stuff. Fortunately, I think I was right about that. The four of us went to Taste of India for dinner and I talked to Katy a lot while the guys babbled about motorcycles and stuff. Afterwards we went back and played a game of Ricochet Robot while Seth worked on sanding stuff for a cool model plane he's building.

Um, this weekend is largely unstructured for me, so if anyone in the Seattle area particularly wanted to hang out, they should let me know. I have a buncha chores to accomplish like more clothes/shoe shopping, possibly hitting IKEA for a new dresser, doing laundry and cleaning up around here, etc, and of course trying to get in a bunch of walking and exercise... but it'd be good to see people for dinner or things like that.
Today there was clothes shopping. I found a skirt I really wanted at JC Penney's at Northgate, but they only had it in size 4. It wasn't in the catalog, but they said I could try the Alderwood Mall branch... which is like 11 miles away. So I went there. The Penney's in Alderwood kicked butt, and not only did I find the skirt in my size, but I found like four tops I wanted. Dude, clothes shopping still sucks, but I guess I'm getting better at it. The only thing that really hurts me is that I only wear cool and dark colours for the most part and refuse to wear anything pink, orange, yellow, lime, violet, etc... and this time of year, those are the big colours out on all the clothing racks. So I'll find a style of shirt I like and the only acceptable colour it'll come in is green or blue or dark brown or something.

I would have done more looking around the mall, except Drew called me at 3:15ish like "Hey, I'm at the CMU alumni picnic thingy and a whole bunch of people wondered why you're not here..." and I thought, oh damn, maybe I should go to that thing after all. So I went down to Gasworks for the picnic. It was like 4 when I got there and I think it started at 2, but it worked out okay. I talked to a whole bunch of people I knew, and then some people decided to play CS Volleyball for a while. I still have all my volleyball reflexes, which rules. I was actually kind of surprised. What I don't have anymore is setting hands, so it was all bumping, but still, it was good, I could even spike. I really should try playing volleyball again. The gym has pick-up volleyball some evenings, I should just go and see how it is... nothing to lose, really, right?

Oh, so anyway, after volleyballing for an hour or two, it started getting rainy-ish. I had made vague plans with Brian M for the evening since I hadn't seen him in a bazillion years, but Drew and Jason wanted to hang out too, so I said we could all hang out! So Brian came over and we met up with Drew, Jason, and some other guy whose name I never quite caught who was a CMU undergrad and will be a UW grad student. We went to Taste of India for dinner. It was CRAZY crowded and service was lousy, but food was tasty, chai was plentiful, and conversation was good. After dinner we came back here, and played a couple games of Ricochet Robot, which I've been itching to play lately. Brian and Drew totally killed me the first game, but I came back with a vengeance and won 10 out of 17 goals in the second game. It was pretty funny.

I guess I filled all my weekend goals except for seeing Bewitched. Well, I didn't walk around Greenlake, either, but I did play volleyball outdoors for at least an hour, so I think that qualifies in the same place, namely "get exercise outdoors".

February 2019

S M T W T F S
     12
3 456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
2425262728