tonight i wore a button-up shirt that shouldn't be worn whilst climbing. then i went climbing. i had the best night on the wall in months.
COINCIDENCE? I think... so.
Recently in mumbles Category
in case you haven't been keeping up, i'm big into tea now. in fact, i've dropped coffee for the time being, as i sort some things out, but rather than give up caffeine or switch to chocolate, i've started drinking tea, and lots of it.
last night i figured out how to brew dragonwell tea, or at least, i figured out that i was steeping it too long in water that was much too hot, and once i lowered the water temp and steeped it a minute less, the astringency/bitterness vanished, and the buttery sweetness came through.
dragonwell is a chinese green tea that is so great, chairman mao served it to nixon when the potus visited china.
to make things better, my ingenuitea arrived today, finally. i have used it a total of once, and in concert with my discovery of how to properly brew dragonwell, i am seriously impressed. it could not be easier to use. the unfortunate part is that now that my tea is not bitter, i can taste the poor quality of our office water. still, it beats drinking uninfused water.
we went a-walking for dinner to l&l hawaiian bbq, but i couldn't bring myself to eat at a place that was so obviously a chain, and, what's more, could not hope to stand up to the quality of the hawaiian place of yesteryear, which lasted far too not long enough before closing shop and being replaced by a lame-ass 10 dollar burger place.
anyhow, i couldn't do it, so we went a-walking again, to the thai place that i've avoided for the last decade, to give it the prescribed Second Chance. sadly for the thai, on the way, we noticed our local tapas place, and could not escape its gravity well.
the meal was excellent, and the wine, though not great, went well with the food. altogether a fortuitous diversion, though quite a bit more costly than our intended dinners. heh.
americans supposedly believe that our current president is a muslim.
an informal and likely illegal poll of my american coworkers turned up 3 people who did not believe the president is a muslim, including myself, and 0 who did. i did not check birth certificates in the process of this informal and likely illegal poll.
on her way out the door, hops stopped by my pants, and then came over and accused: "you didn't have much money in your wallet".
me: "oh, jeez, so sorry"
hops: "i need money for lunch"
me: "huh, i guess you'll have to find a real bank"
hops: sad face
last night at the gym i made an astonishing breakthrough in the field of quantum physics. i expect a call from the nobel committee at any moment.
many people are familiar with the paradox of schroedinger's cat. in this famous though experiment, a cat is put inside a box with a radioactive poison pellet. after the pellet has decayed, the mathematics prove conclusively that the cat is both alive and dead until such time as the lid of the box is removed and the cat is observed.
this is confusing, counterintuitive, and hard to explain. the solution, and my breakthrough, is the more mundane and familiar experience of schroedinger's dump. this describes the situation where one clips a mighty yam, closes the toilet seat, and flushes. until such time as the toilet lid is lifted, the grogan exists in both the flushed and unflushed states.
in this way, using metaphors that are easily understandable to people who do not own cats, boxes, or radioactive poison pellets, quantum physics can be easily explained.
the 2010 toady award for most surprisingly not bad, nay, even good movie goes to... "The Brother From Another Planet." Hooray!
I was expecting schlocky, wink-and-not Shafty blaxploitation. Instead, I got a well thought out, nicely acted, often genuinely funny film. It had some awkward moments, and some lame moments. But the villains could have been really stupid, or offensive to white people, or both: but they were neither. Instead, they were creepy, villainous, and downright effective at their roles. The science in the science fiction was reasonable. I could go on, but the point is: don't let the shlocky title steer you away, this was an excellent movie.
Way better than "The Dark Crystal".
after the song ended but before hte light turned green, he shouted something very NSFW to express his discontent.
this is the same homeless guy who walked into a restaurant i was eating at, up to my table, and told me and my guests that hte restaurant was going to send me a letter explaining why i had food poisoning.
anyhow, no letter, no poison, no way i'm gonna turn down my bagpipe volume.
i don't get many first-evers. the world is old enough and i'm slow enough that if there's something to be done, someone else has done it first.
however, i am proud to announce that yesterday, i got a first-ever, and a prestigious one at that: I am the first person ever to pay at Beltramo's with a discover card.
I've been trying to use my discover card there for a decade, and finally, as a joke, yesterday I asked if they take it yet. Someone ran out from the back, presumably a manager, and said that their new POS system, installed just this weekend, takes Discover.
Oddly, discover did not call me up to confirm the massive charge incurred at the peninsula's best liquor store and premier scotch destination.
i had quite the laugh the other day when creating my character in Borderlands.
The default name for the soldier (AKA gunslinger) was "Roland".
Har har har!
On a related note, I just finished book 3 of The Dark Tower (with a main character named "Roland", occupation Gunslinger, see?).
I've never really read any of King's "horror" books. I've read The Stand (and liked it), I've read his book on writing (uh, I think it's called "On Writing") and loved it. The Dark Tower has some awkward stuff, and it sure is long (which was his explicit goal, according to Himself), but I'm digging it.
