percentage of chart which resembles pac-man
1. Show was great Friday night. All the bands -- Not Art Collaborative, Amoroso, Debate, and Calumet-Hecla were excellent. Not everyone stuck around for us -- can't blame them, we went on after midnight and it was pouring rain -- but I think we played pretty solidly, and we closed with our new open-ended instrumental, which went really well. Next show is Thursday the 20th at the Abbey with Aaron Burr and the Swamp Pistols, 92 Protons, and Senior Discount.
2. Sarah and I threw a dinner party for a few friends Saturday night, which was a lot of fun. I grilled some steaks that Sarah had marinated for a couple of days (soy sauce, ginger, garlic, lemon), and I'm at the point now where I can actually prepare steaks to order on our gigantic Foreman grill. Sarah made up some zucchini orzo salad, kale and tomatoes, and for dessert we had 'hockey pucks' (you spread some peanut butter between two Ritz crackers, cover them in melted chocolate, and refrigerate.) It was a good time all-around, though I overate -- I spent an hour afterwards doing the dishes, merrilly eating leftovers as I went.
3. Yesterday was nice too -- I didn't get out of the house until about four, still kind of reeling from the time change -- but Sarah and I went out for some delicious late-afternoon pizza at Regina's, then came back to the house and chilled for a bit, and then we watched "Away From Her", during which I wept like a little girl. Honestly, I don't know that I've ever been so moved by a film -- it made some of the movies I've seen recently like "The Savages" seem unambitious by comparison -- and I don't know that I've ever seen such an honest depiction of love and loss. Gordon Pinsent's absence from the best actor Oscar nominations was positively criminal, and the fact that a movie this rich, achingly truthful, and sure-footed was made by 28-year-old Sarah Polley blows my mind.
4. Tonight we're heading to the South End to try some Vietnamese cuisine at Pho Republique as part of Restaurant Week. Geez, this post has really been kinda food-heavy, eh? Of course, these days, so am I. At the gym, there are little leaderboards saying who's been there the most -- "Superstars" who visit 15+ times a month, "All-Stars" who visit 12-14 times, and "Almost Stars" who make it 10-11. Over the four months we've been going, Sarah has been ascending through the ranks, whereas February saw me fall off completely with a mere seven visits over 29 days. Now that the new job is stabilizing a bit, I'm trying to get back on the horse. And the elliptical.
5. And speaking of the job, things are going well. The learning curve is still pretty fierce, but I've been slowly making headway. I had one of those wonderful programmer's epiphanies on Friday, having spent several hours poring through thousands of lines of someone else's code to locate a bug, and then finally finding and fixing it. I'm also continuing to make friends here -- last week I went to a conference on printing in Boston, as a lot of my work over the next few months is going to involve developing printing software -- and the fellow who runs our print shop is an affable fellow named Shawn who also happens to look a helluva lot like Mr. T, to the extent that he actually moonlights as a professional impersonator. So it was a lot of fun roaming around the conference with him, and then a bunch of us went to an after-party at "Cheers" (really the Bull & Finch Club) in Beacon Hill, where we were waited on hand and foot by guys from one of our print suppliers. Always a little weird to be brought drinks by sixty-something executives, but I'll take 'em.
2. Sarah and I threw a dinner party for a few friends Saturday night, which was a lot of fun. I grilled some steaks that Sarah had marinated for a couple of days (soy sauce, ginger, garlic, lemon), and I'm at the point now where I can actually prepare steaks to order on our gigantic Foreman grill. Sarah made up some zucchini orzo salad, kale and tomatoes, and for dessert we had 'hockey pucks' (you spread some peanut butter between two Ritz crackers, cover them in melted chocolate, and refrigerate.) It was a good time all-around, though I overate -- I spent an hour afterwards doing the dishes, merrilly eating leftovers as I went.
3. Yesterday was nice too -- I didn't get out of the house until about four, still kind of reeling from the time change -- but Sarah and I went out for some delicious late-afternoon pizza at Regina's, then came back to the house and chilled for a bit, and then we watched "Away From Her", during which I wept like a little girl. Honestly, I don't know that I've ever been so moved by a film -- it made some of the movies I've seen recently like "The Savages" seem unambitious by comparison -- and I don't know that I've ever seen such an honest depiction of love and loss. Gordon Pinsent's absence from the best actor Oscar nominations was positively criminal, and the fact that a movie this rich, achingly truthful, and sure-footed was made by 28-year-old Sarah Polley blows my mind.
4. Tonight we're heading to the South End to try some Vietnamese cuisine at Pho Republique as part of Restaurant Week. Geez, this post has really been kinda food-heavy, eh? Of course, these days, so am I. At the gym, there are little leaderboards saying who's been there the most -- "Superstars" who visit 15+ times a month, "All-Stars" who visit 12-14 times, and "Almost Stars" who make it 10-11. Over the four months we've been going, Sarah has been ascending through the ranks, whereas February saw me fall off completely with a mere seven visits over 29 days. Now that the new job is stabilizing a bit, I'm trying to get back on the horse. And the elliptical.
5. And speaking of the job, things are going well. The learning curve is still pretty fierce, but I've been slowly making headway. I had one of those wonderful programmer's epiphanies on Friday, having spent several hours poring through thousands of lines of someone else's code to locate a bug, and then finally finding and fixing it. I'm also continuing to make friends here -- last week I went to a conference on printing in Boston, as a lot of my work over the next few months is going to involve developing printing software -- and the fellow who runs our print shop is an affable fellow named Shawn who also happens to look a helluva lot like Mr. T, to the extent that he actually moonlights as a professional impersonator. So it was a lot of fun roaming around the conference with him, and then a bunch of us went to an after-party at "Cheers" (really the Bull & Finch Club) in Beacon Hill, where we were waited on hand and foot by guys from one of our print suppliers. Always a little weird to be brought drinks by sixty-something executives, but I'll take 'em.