Dear obnoxious asshat,
People on television cannot hear you when you shout at them.
People at the gym can hear you, but aren’t interested in your play-by-play of the Holiday Bowl.
People at the gym also aren’t interested in your cell phone conversations.
Signed,
The annoyed guy with misfortune of picking the elliptical machine next to you
Note to self: Don’t ever forget headphones again. Ever.
I managed to get a rental car approved and take my car to the body shop yesterday morning. They were supposed to call me today with an estimate, but I didn’t hear from them. I’ll call tomorrow. I ended up with a Dodge Stratus from Enterprise. The damn thing has a tape player. What is this? 1985?
I got to attend a lecture by Bjarne Stroustrup, the father of C++ at lunch and then headed to the Alamo Village for ROTK. The Stroustup lecture was a little underwhelming, but I think it was because the people who were hosting the lecture didn’t give him input on what to include in his one hour talk. All I can say about ROTK is WOW. I must say that I was disappointed with the new ending, but otherwise I was pretty impressed. The battles were totally amazing. I hope Andy Serkis gets a nomination for Supporting Actor this year. I’m sure there’ll be lots of Oscar nods for this installment with speculation running high that it’ll win Best Director or Best Picture. I’d tend to go with director. How cool would it be to be able to refer to the man responsible for Dead Alive as Oscar-winning? Poor Elijah Wood continued to spend most of his time either looking worried or falling in slow motion. I must say that even though I can’t STAND Sean Astin, he did a good job. Shelob was really cool as were the Nazgul. The set design continued to impress, especially the dark and evil places. I was struck by how a lot of the stuff in Heavenly Creatures hinted at the same style that’s seen in ROTK.
The 1 or 2 readers of this blog will recall that I’ve railed about senior citizen drivers and how they should have annual mandatory testing to keep their licenses. You’ll find it amusing then that we were hit by an elderly driver on the way home from the grocery store last night. The whole family was in the car and no one was injured. My pristine, never-been-in-an accident, four-and-a-half-year-old, almost paid-off car, however, looks like this. I won’t go into the gory details, but it was clearly the other guy’s fault and he admitted as much at the scene. We also have a witness who gave us his name and phone number. It’s a little odd in that the guy has insurance and driver’s license from Arizona, also lives part of the year here in Austin and was driving a rental car from San Antonio at the time. I get to deal with insurance mess for the rest of the week and Mary gets to play chauffeur for at least today and possibly tomorrow until I can get his insurance company to approve a rental. They still have to get his side of the story. Joy. Happy Birthday to me.
We just got back from Sybil and Pascal’s annual party. We almost always make it for just a little while. We like going because we get to see people that we really only see once or twice a year other than at this party. It was the usual suspects with a surprise appearance by the Brian Sharples who was the President of IntelliQuest when I worked there. He’s working a couple of different things at the moment, but leaning away from the tech industry for now. We caught up a little, but his daughter was having a meltdown, so he had to bail. I posted some photos from the event, but as with most of the photos around here, you’ll have to be a registered user to see them. As an added bonus, I also posted some black and white photos of Henry that Sybil took the first time he attended in 1999.
The Boy and I got up early yesterday morning and took The Wife’s car in to NTB to take advantage of the road hazard insurance that we purchased. We were out of there in 30 minutes and it didn’t cost us a cent. It turns out that the father of one of the kids in The Boy’s class is the manager of that particular location. We went to Krispy Kreme afterwards. I estimated that 1/2 dozen would be enough for us to have and bring some back to The Wife and LaLa, but The Boy ate 4 doughnuts and we came back empty handed, much to The Wife’s dismay. She and LaLa ended up making it to the Hilary Clinton book signing after all on Friday. She shook Hilary’s hand and they talked briefly about Bill Clinton Namugosa, the baby named after Bill on his visit to Uganda. Unfortunately, they weren’t allowing pictures.
We attended the Capital Tree Lighting and Holiday Sing-a-long last night with the Rihas and the English. We were a little late as my afternoon nap ran long, but we caught a fair number of carols. We tried stopping at Little City after the festivities to get some warm beverages, but they clearly weren’t prepared for the volume of customers. We should’ve forsaken supporting local business for efficiency and gone to The Great Corporate Evil. With Stepan’s assistance, we managed to get a family photo good enough for this year’s holiday cards. I ordered them this morning, so with any luck (and some help from the U.S. Postal Service), people will get them before Xmas.
EDIT (12.08.2003): Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that there are also new pictures of the week from Saturday night.
We headed to Wink Saturday night for a belated birthday celebration for Mary. As always, the food, wine and service were sublime. This is the best restaurant in town without a doubt.
We followed dinner with a stop at 219 West. The review is pretty accurate. It’s a nice place full of the type of people that I’m not generally interested in being around. We were there early enough that we had the scotch area pretty much to ourselves, so it wasn’t too bad. The service and drinks were good and it was quiet enough that we were able to talk.
We ended the night by taking a cab over to Casino El Camino where it became apparent that I had overestimated my current tolerance. We’ve been going out less and less over the past year and I’ve definitely been relegated to the third string when it comes to a long evening of drinking. Taking the second cab of the night home meant that Mary had to drive the babysitter home while I passed out on the bed. Not quite the way that I had intended the birthday night to end. Poor Mary. I spent most of yesterday nursing myself back to some semblence of normal and we paid a visit to deliver dinner to the Shackelfords who recently had twin boys.
I’ll post more pictures from Wurstfest tonight.
We made our annual family pilgrimage to New Braunfels yesterday for Wurstfest. We were met there by Stepan & Jfer and the English family (along with Kevin’s parents). The weather was fairly cold and it was overcast and drizzling for most of the day. The outing was a success for the most part. We ate all of our usual foods: potato pancakes with applesauce and sausage, bratwurst on a stick, pork chop on a stick, funnel cake, fried pickles and, of course, Paulaner Octoberfest with Sprite and Wurstfest Wasser (their own branded bottled water) for the young’uns.
The big disappointment of the day was Jimmy Sturr and his Orchestra’s failure to play the Chicken Dance (The link I picked is a bit dry, but it’s the first one that I could find that didn’t have blink tags or start one of those annoying midi loops. There oughta be a law). They normally play it and it was particularly disappointing since we had taken the time to teach the moves to The Boy beforehand. As evidenced by my link, the Chicken Dance is apparently really cool with the preschool set once they’ve been turned on to it. Luckily, the band that followed Jimmy Sturr played it and The Boy had a ball. We’ll have to reconsider scheduling our trip around Mr. Sturr’s performance in the future if he’s not going to play the required fare.
The Boy was more taken with the cheap carnival rides and games this year. Thankfully, the games aren’t a total rip-off. They give the kids something even if they don’t win and if you shell out $5 as opposed to the basic $2, they’ll let you pick out whatever you want from the prize junk regardless of whether your kid won or not. He scored a small crab, a medium-sized gorilla and a fairly large inflatable Spider-Man. He also proclaimed upon seeing another kid with a frog hat that he wanted a hat. We waited until the end of the day and convinced him that he needed an alpine Wurstfest hat (mainly because of cost). Unfortunately, the only color left was yellow. He seemed happy with his choice.
I think The La’s favorites were sausage, funnel cake and polka music. She also seemed to like the carousel. I’ve posted pictures of both kids. We got enough decent shots that I’ll probably rotate in a new one for each later in the week.
I found this link via Off the Kuff. I think it’s a great idea. If the pro-lifers can politely harass contractors into stopping construction, then those who believe in pro-choice can do the same. I’m calling Spiderhouse this week and Mr. Danze will also hear from me. As mentioned, it’s important to be clear and polite. Get on the phone, people or they’ll think they can get away with this whenever they want.
There’s a midwife rally this Thursday at 5pm on the south lawn of the Capitol. Work permitting, we’ll all be there. You can get more information here.
The rally is basically to support access to midwives in all settings: home, birth center, and hospital. Access to midwives in hospitals here in Austin was severely limited last year when both Brackenridge and Seton lost support for midwife managed births for various political and financial reasons. For those that are unaware, The Boy was delivered by a midwife at a birth center (which is now a craft store) and The La was delivered by another midwife at our house.