Counter Thingy that Counts Crap

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

weigh-in

Finally got the balls to step back on the scale after getting back on the dietary wagon.

214.5. w00t.

If you look at my 'weight' tags, I've reached my original target... for July 07. :(

200 by Xmas?

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

oh, also

Saturday marked the demise of my Rock Band drum pedal, which is pretty common for those about to rock (we salute you). Mummifying it with masking tape has rendered it usable still (snapped at the hinge). Luckily, there's a massive aftermarket for this shit.

hi

in honor of what the majority of my posts are, I renamed this bitch.

Oh, speaking of:

Friday: Worked on the drywall in the garage, hung out with the dog. Ellen was out in mid-MO with Gretchen. Helen came over after some trivia night thing I bitched out on. Eric was in FL for his bro's graduation. We went out to Friday's and drank and people watched, good times. I managed to get her to close Friday's at 3am, which was a feat in and of itself.

Saturday: Woke up entirely too early feeling way too good. I attribute it to the Midol I took before bed since we were out of Ibuprofen. Putzed around the house most of the day, washed/waxed the car, cruised around b/c it was nice out. Met up with Helen for Steak n' Shake, then putzed around the house and drank a little, played Rock Band until Jake came over. Then the 3 of us took Jake on the standard collinsville bar circuit. Hurricane's poured it up like usual. Ran into one of Helen's customers at Johnny's, nice dude. Went over to Friday's S., where Jake immediately hooked up a number, talked shit about some whore, and got me in trouble with the girls large girl-cousin who stared me down until I 'stopped looking hard'. I told her I wasn't trying to look hard, and it was probably due to my shaved head, and that I was growing hair as fast as possible. The staring contest continued. I'm glad I was half-drunk for that.

Anyway, they had a band, it was cool. I think we closed it down again, time is kinda blurry. Wound up back at the house. I had a stogie, Jake puked in the toilet. Passed out.

Sunday: Woke up confused, with Ellen in the bed. Confused because it was 6am. Apparently they decided to just drive home instead of sleeping saturday. Dumb. Anyway, went back to bed, took jake out for breakfast at Spring Garden, he split, we hit wally world for grocs and other asundries. Spent way too much cash, but we had basically no food. Now we have miniature bananas, kiwis, plums, veggies, and other random shit. Never shop hungover.
Took a 4-5 hour nap mid afternoon, caught up on DVR shit, ellen was back in bed by 8, I wound up staying up till 11.

Monday, April 21, 2008

that monday shiz

Friday: Laid low. Met up with the Davies for La Esperansa, the new mexican joint that used to be some other mexican joint of awesome love, but is now something else. But it's awesome still. Went home, chilled, RockBanded for a while, they split early-ish. Went to bed halfway early.

Saturday: Woke up, putzed around the house all morning, met up with Steve & Lori in Staunton, IL to start our "redneck bar crawl" around 2pm. Started off with lunch in Staunton. Afterwards, our first stop was Mr. T's Tavern & Package Liquor:

Stag was on tap, so I had one. First round (for 4 people): $6.00. Awesome. And dangerous.

After we finished our beers, we walked the half-paved streets of Staunton looking for another open bar, to no avail. We then made our way to "The Log Cabin Bar". I don't have any pictures of it for some reason, but it's a log cabin. There, I moved on to Old Millewauke Light (on tap) and started chatting up an old regular named "Voogie" or something. Real nice guy, story was that he was a high-end car broker in LA before retiring back to IL. Lots of stories of partying with Eddie Van Halen and Don Henley. Pretty surreal. He bought the bar a round. I had another Stag.

Then it was on to Benld (aka "I'd like to buy a vowel, pronounced Ben-Eld"), for Capone's bar-something-or-other. It was almost 4 by then. We may have already been in Benld at the log cabin joint. Not sure. At any rate, there was some VERY loud Annie Lennox playing, and a 'rough' crowd. (Rough for Annie Lennox fans at least), the most loud-ass drunk people I've ever seen in my life. The bartender was a hippie chick with no shoes on. It was awesome. I had a Coke. The bathroom was labeled awesome-ly.


We left after a drink. Made our way over to KJ's, where Ellen and I were mocked for noting that the bottles of booze behind the bar had prices written on them in Sharpie. PBR on tap was had. George Strait was listened to. The bathroom floor felt like it was gonna give out from under me. We were warned that "the state troopers were in town" on our way out. Kind locals.

We then made our way up to Gillespie, IL (not to be confused with much smaller East Gillespie). We landed at Val's Vittles/Chiefs II (not to be confused with Chiefs I, even though the stained glass on the beer cooler said Chiefs I, and not II). The bar is to the left.

Moved up in the world, had a Bud Select. Bartender was nice. Keeping in the theme, since we were completely obviously out of place at these joints, we were asked what we were doing in town, what we were doing the day, where we'd been, where we were going, etc. Kinda neat. Finished our drinks, and headed on down Rt 4.

Hit Carlinville, stopped at the Best Value Inn to get accomodations for the night. Hit Nick's Pizza for an awesome Italian sammach and shitty salad bar. Ate too much.

We went through Carlinville, and made our way to "The Carport Bar", which didn't have a carport on it anymore, and was called Full Throttle or something. Nothing eventful. Had a beer, they were setting up a bad (Hoosier Daddies) for a benefit for some R.D. guy.

Made our way back to Carlinville, where we landed at Hollywood & Vine. We were greeted by an incredibly creepy black and white full-size cut out of Clark Gable. The frontage window was full of... Vines. Really.

The bartender was Helen, and approximately 200 years old. I ordered a Jack and Coke, which she tried to talk me out of because "she (the owner? no one else was there) wants to charge $4 for Jack". I knew this already, since it was written on the bottle. I pushed for it. Across from the bar, above the "For Entertainment Only" (wink wink) slots was the Wall of Gable:
And of course, what apparently-Gable-themed bar in middle-of-nowhere, IL would be complete without a small Clark Gable puppet with a smaller Clark Gable puppet on its lap? (Flanked by Christmas trees. In April.)

Of course, I was completely elated:

(That's my Clark Gable-elated face)

After the 'experience' there, we headed to "The Square" (which is actually a circle/roundabout). There were about 4-5 bars here, none of which I know the names of. The first bar wasn't anything amazing, but there was this VERY drunk dude in a wheelchair, who rambled about the most incredible shit. I can't even comprehend most of it still, but there was one tirade where he was talking about his incredibly-awesome Mad Max-style power chair (seriously, thing had like huge off-road tires, bunch of copper tubing caged around his legs). Basically he was just talking about all the things that his wheelchair could kill:
  • Dogs
  • Fish
  • People
  • Motherfuckers out there
  • Everyone
  • Fuckin' Protazoans on the sidewalk.
  • E Boli Virus
  • Cats
  • Some other bacteria. Not sure what it was, but his biology teacher assured him "it was a motherfucker"
Another tale was about peacocks. Apparently there were some frozen ones in an ice storm falling out of a tree. He then invited some into his apartment, where they landed on his patio and hung out. Then he segue'd into another peacock story, which I managed to grab a snippet of on my phone:

http://www.soundupload.com/audio/6s0f0223h9s021b

Incredible.

We then hopped around to a couple other bars, with varying degrees of success. Actually pretty dead, we'd concluded that everyone was at "RD's" benefit thing, which wheelchair guy claimed was bullshit. Oh ya, we ran into him later at a different bar. This time it was something about the Ohio River.

The food and cumulation of beer had teamed up against all of us, and the lack of interesting people led us to be tired, we went back to the hotel around 12:30 or so and split ways.

Sunday: Woke up around 8, made the trek back to Collinsville to let the dog piss. We then wound up doing some shopping (for work clothes for me), and scoured the greater Fairview area for affordable patio furniture. We made a side trip to a carnival for exteremely overpriced corn dog action, and then looked at dogs at Petsmart. Found a set (of furniture) we liked, borrowed Nate's truck, took it home, and assembled it while Ellen worked on the yard a bit. Then sat down, had a beer, and chilled in the new comfy outdoor furniture. Headed inside, caught up on DVR action, and went to bed early.

Monday, April 14, 2008

wedding'd!

I'm back. Whew! First off, as predicted, Benjamin Lown was born while we were gone, so yay them.

Thursday: Took off work early. Went to La Esperanza, the place that used to be Los Copreales, which was our former favorite mexican joint in town. Esperanza got their liquor license, so they're now our favorite, narrowly beating out Ramon's on food quality. Anyway, stuffed selves, went home to pack, with aspirations of getting to bed very early so we could be alive on Friday. Our flight was at 6a, so figured on waking up around 3ish in order to get to Lambert with enough time to navigate their constantly-fucked security situation. Ellen told me she was going to to do some laundry, which I thought she had already started since I kept hearing what I thought was the washing machine cycling downstairs.

Turns out, it was the sump pump constantly cycling because of the flooding in the basement. Fuck.

After moving things to higher ground, we tried to move all the water towards the sump, which we thought had come in under the poorly-sealed door. After clearing all the water, it was back a minute later. After some more CSI-work, I spotted bubbles coming from a crack in the floor. Awesome. Turns out the ground was so coimpletely saturated from our record rainfall, that the latest storm just pushed things over the edge, and water was flowing up through the ground.

Anyway, after screwing with that, it was a restless night of barely sleeping between worrying about the basement getting worse and have the rattly sump pump kick on every 5 minutes just as I was falling asleep. 3am came pretty fast.

Friday: dragged ass outta bed, did the airport shuffle, even getting their 2 hours early we made it to the gate with 15 minutes to spare. I hate Lambert. We had a connecting flight in Pittsburgh, with a 30 minute layover. Flight out was on-time, but of course we sat at the gate for 30 minutes waiting for 'paperwork' before we could take off. Got to PA and over to our other flight with -1 minutes, luckily we had 9 people on our flight that were heading to richmond, 3 of which were pilots, so they waited for us.

Got the Richmond without incident. C&C picked us up, and we went and checked into the hotel. Headed over to Pam's parents for leftover BBQ from thursday. Met the parents, both totally awesome. Girls went to get nails done, we drank beer with pam's dad for a little bit, then hit the cigar shop for accountrements. Went to the hotel again, hung out while we waited for ben & same, then headed over to get our tuxes. I wound up with a 40 coat instead of a 44, and a medium vest instead of a large, so they had to overnight my shit. Back to the hotel, changed, and did the rehersal thing, then over to this awesome italian joint for awesome italian food. Pam's dad gave an amazing speech, gifts in the form of booze were given (yay scotch), then it was back to the hotel for drinks. We bowed out halfway early due to death via tiredness. Then Nate dragged us out for cigars. Wound up in bed around midnight or 1 i guess.

Saturday: did the wedding thing. Played a lot of hangman on the whiteboard waiting for pictures. Good times. Wedding went off without a hitch, and even being an hour long Catholic wedding, it seemed to fly by. More pictures, then back to the hotel for vodka shots, and cocktail hour. Reception followed. Nate and Pam's entrance was awesome, with dancing and whatnot. Maid of honor Lauren started the speeches and did hers to the theme from the Fresh Prince, with groomsmen providing backup beat-box skeeelz. I'm sure it was horrible, but I couldn't hear the whole effect over my funky beats. I followed up with a haphazard nervous speech that was received much better than it sounded coming out of my mouth at the time. I actually got a lot of compliments on it through the night, so I guess it didn't suck. Standard reception revelry commenced, with video proof of jigs, Steve Perry powerslides, Schweighart dances and all sorts of other dorky white-person wedding shit. Awesome. Oh, there was an interpretive dance for American Pie, which was random and very confusing. But awesome.

After party commenced around 10, pizzas were ordered, cigars were smoked, scotch was drank, good times were had, $100+ bar tab was ran up. In bed by... 2? 1? Not sure.

Sunday: Woke up at some point, dragged ass out of the hotel, got to the airport, slept on the flight to PA, had an hour and a half layover this time, got to experience the incredible-ness that is the Pittsburgh airport. Seriously. Mall environment, had EVERYTHING. Great food court, Sbarro and all. Had a slice, ellen poked around the Gap, it was just bizarre. Grabbed plane to STL, slept more. Was greeted with 40* windy shit and snow spits, after being in 80* VA, we of course didn't bring coats. Got car, stopped by schnucks for randoms foods, grabbed tacobell, and went home. Watched I Am Legend, in bed by 8. My body is still completely beat to shit from boozery and wearing rental shoes and being on my feet for 16 hours Saturday. I think I'm still catching up from my lack of sleep Thursday as well. Jacuzzi heals all wounds. And coffee. And evil/awesome baked egg souffles from Panera. So good.