Easter Ramblings

Currently Reading: The Gallic War by Julius Caesar

And here we are, safely through Lent and able to eat what we want again. I may have mentioned in a previous post but if you missed it, I gave up pork for lent. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Hot dogs, for example, are easily found made of beef. Same with bologna too. True, I couldn't eat brats or a pepperoni pizza but I managed to get by. What was killing me was the meatless Fridays. I'm not a big veggie fan nor do I eat much fish so taking away my meats pretty much means I go vegetarian for the day. Fortunately they're doing marvelous stuff with soy and I was able to get by using that.

I'm having a very long weekend at the moment. CC and I went out for Sunday brunch at Texas de Brazil so I had to get Sunday off. That wasn't really a problem and so it was looking like I'd have a three day weekend. Ah, not so fast. You see on Thursday I went to work and found out that corporate wanted us to reduce the amount of hours budgeted to the salon by about a third or so. It happens from time to time, no big deal. In my case though, it ended up extending my weekend by a day. Since Thursday was so slow anyway, my boss told me to take the day off. So now my three day weekend is up to a FOUR day weekend. Not bad right? But wait, there's still more! I stopped off at the salon on the way home from my parents' house and checked to see if there were any changes I needed to know about for this week. Turns out I'm also off MONDAY too. It's now a FIVE day weekend for me! I haven't had this much time off since I took a vacation a while back.

What's going on here is that we're transitioning from the old schedule to the new one. The past two times we did this, I ended up working a six day week and a 9 day week. This is sort of balancing that out. My days off were at the end of last week and in the transition they're at the beginning. The week after that we'll slip into our normal schedule, assuming it hasn't changed again for some reason.

So, what have we been doing with all that free time? Not much really. I had a total of 1 afternoon's worth of chores and 5 days to spread them over. Instead of doing most of the work, CC and I ended up doing quite a bit of shopping and/or browsing. Thursday was the exception. I just totally blew off Thursday. Friday CC also had off so we went out to the mall looking for a few things. Didn't find any of them though. What we DID find was a HUGE crowd. A whole lot of people took Friday off this year and a good chunk of them decided to go visit the mall. We also saw Blades of Glory, the new Will Farrell movie. DAMN funny, especially if you like Farrell or figure skating. It might not be everybody's cup of tea but it sure had us laughing all the way through.

Saturday was another shopping day of sorts. I had a prescription that needed to be refilled and CC needed to grab a few things for her trip. That didn't take long so we decided to check out the outdoor mall. Hit the bookstore, had coffee and cheesecake. Ok, I had chai latte actually, CC had coffee and instead of cheesecake she had some sort of chocolate thing that was REALLY rich but you get the idea. That pretty much took care of the afternoon and that was about all we did Saturday.

Today, busy again and a trip to yet ANOTHER mall. We had our Easter brunch, as I said, but it was so early when we finished that we decided to kill a little time downtown. We also need to walk off all that food we'd eaten.

Our first stop was the Peabody hotel, which is right next to where we ate. CC had never been inside before and I figured she'd like it. We walked through the lobby and over to the central fountain where the ducks hang out during the day. Every morning the ducks are paraded down from their rooftop home to the lobby. This is done with a lot of fanfare and it's a trademark of the hotel. Then, every evening, they're taken back up to the roof.

You can get really close to the ducks if you want. The lip of the fountain is only about a foot across and the ducks swim right up to the edge. If you wanted to, you could reach out and pet one I suppose. For some reason one particular duck decided she was going to wash herself right in front of me so I got splashed quite a few times. Didn't bother me any though. After working as a dog bather as long as I have, it takes more than a little water to make me flinch.

After the ducks we ran across a really fancy Chinese imports gallery. They seemed to deal mostly in jade and ivory. The pieces they had, sculpture, were HUGE. Well not all of them, but they had several HUGE pieces, let's put it that way. They had two or three sets of carved tusks. And when I say tusks, I don't mean the small ones you can put on a shelf or over your fireplace. These are the ones you can almost use as the archway to a DOOR. There were also several ivory pagodas that were hand carved. The biggest one was selling for $125,000.

We worked our way back to where we parked which meant going through another mall. It's much smaller than the two we'd visited on Friday and Saturday. We decided to stop in at the arcade there. It's a LOT better than the one at the big mall from Friday. The games we played Sunday were a lot more work really. There's a police trainer/shooter where you have to do a lot of ducking. It's not the one where you hit the little pedal and your character ducks. Oh no, if you want to duck in this game you have to actually bend your knees and DUCK. It's really fun but the longer you play it the longer you realize that probably you're not used to doing this much ducking on a daily basis.

Then we played two games of Hyperbowl. Have you seen this game? It's fantastic.

You stand in front of pedestal which is really just a HUGE trackball made out of a bowling ball. You roll and spin this ball down a SERIOUSLY complex bowling alley made to match various themes. I played San Francisco first where you roll the ball down one hill, then another, then a third, all the while dodging street cars, then UP a final hill where the pins sit. Talk about tough. After watching me, CC tried her hand at Yosemite which was basically bowling through a forest. Then we did a two player game using the Rome set. Just had a blast playing that game.

Went to my parents' house after that for the rest of Easter. Spent some time with the family and played a few MORE video games with my nieces. Got home around 6:00 I suppose and that was pretty much the weekend.

Hope your Easter was as entertaining as our :-)

Must be the weather...

Currently Reading: Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

So much to blog about and no idea where to start. I'm feeling rather indecisive today. In fact, I just typed all this in a chat window with CC. Must be the weather. That's my theory anyway. We've gone a few days without seeing the sun much. Might be the problem.

Lots and lots going on here despite my inability to focus on anything in particular. As you know, I had the week off. Enjoyed that. Unfortunately I now face that feeling you get when your vacation is over and you have to go back to work. It's a sort of positive and negative one isn't it? I mean, yeah it'll be nice to get back to a routine and see the folks at work and play around with the dogs and learn how to be a groomer but at the same time, sure was pretty damn fun not having to wake up until I was done sleeping and to not have to get out of bed until I was ready to.

Did a bit of shopping last week. I finally got an overcoat on Friday. Didn't realize I needed one until just recently. You see, if CC and I go out to a fancy restaurant or to the symphony or any of the shows at the performing arts center and we decide to dress up, even if it's just khakis and a jacket, well, I can't just pull out my Mickey Mouse coat or my Incredibles jacket can I? I need a coat that's more fitting. Fortunately this time of year is great for coat buying. Everyone is putting them on clearance so they can drag out the bathing suits. Let's face it, stores always stock what you're not going to need for 3 months. That's why you can never find a swimsuit in July.

Anyway, last year at about this time I picked up a great leather jacket. This year I picked up a great overcoat. It's not fancy or anything like that. It's your basic black trench coat but it looks great worn with a suit. Looks like something out of the 40's I suppose. I showed it to CC and she said, "Now all you need is a Fedora." And she's right. Looks good though and it's very comfortable and warm. Even better, the lining zips out for when you don't need quite as much insulation, like in the spring or fall. Best part, it was about 75% off :-) I even picked up a scarf and pair of gloves to go with it :-)

I also got the rest of my grooming tools ordered (they arrived today). So now I've got all the tools, I just need to learn how to use them properly. I'm sure I'll need to pick up one or two things along the way though. I haven't found a really good grooming book (one with good descriptions on the fancy cuts, etc.) and there are always new tools coming out that make the job a little easier. In fact, right now my boss has her eye on a vacuum that hooks directly to your clippers which A. keeps them WAY cooler than normal and B. sucks up all the hair before it hits the ground. No mess, no cleaning.

Our weather is very English today. If someone were playing a soundtrack it would probably be classical. It's too cold for this to be jazz weather. And the sky is just this flat gray matte. Makes me sleepy just looking at it :-)

I finally managed to win an autograph auction over on eBay. Up until yesterday I really sucked at those. What normally happens is that I make my bid then someone comes in right before the auction closes and buys if for like a dollar more than I bid. It's called sniping. Yesterday though, I won an autographed picture of Gong Li. We'll add that to our Asian Cinema theme wall that we're sort of working on. Actually it more just happened on its own. Anyway, that picture will go up with the Zhang Ziyi and the Chow Yun Fat and the posters of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Memoirs of a Geisha, and the soon to be added Curse of the Golden Flower. I didn't win the one for the Michelle Yeoh though. Someone came in and bought that one in the last minute. Ah well, at least I won ONE of them.

Speaking of Curse of the Golden Flower, we saw it on Saturday. Our whole weekend was one big cultural experience I guess you'd say. You can read about it on CC's blog. Anyway, loved the movie. Love all of Zhang Yimou's movies really. They don't always have happy endings. In fact, they SELDOM have happy endings, but they're very well done. After seeing Curse, I said to CC, it's too bad the Chinese and English didn't meet sooner. Imagine what Shakespear could have done with THIS sort of material. It's true. Lots of people dying, lots of people sleeping around. All the great elements of a Shakespearian tragedy. I'd like to think it'll win many Oscars, especially for costume and cinematography but I doubt it will. The Academy never seems to want to reward foreign films for anything other than being a good foreign film.

Something rather funny came up this weekend. CC and I were sitting down to lunch on Saturday and she noticed that all the things she wanted to do were old people things. Sunday it was even worse. Let's go over the list. Ok, symphony was FILLED with old people. Yes, there were a few younger folks but they were either clearly music students or kids dragged along against their will. Then after that, lunch at a cafeteria. MAJOR old folks there. Yes, we did see the movie but that was my choice rather than CC's. And while just about everyone in the theater was either asian or accompanied by an asian, the age range was pretty broad. Sunday was brunch at the museum and then walking the museum. Oh yeah, old folks galore. Now, in all fairness, towards mid-afternoon many more young people showed up. Mostly they were academic types, art students, that sort of thing (I told CC I felt out of place because I wasn't wearing a turtle-neck). So it wasn't ENTIRELY old people but there was a definite old people feeling about the place :-)

And now it's Monday. Last day before heading back to work. And it's gray outside, and cold and raining.

Hey, great TV on this weekend wasn't there! Kind of annoying at one point though. I hate it when two shows I want to watch are on opposite each other. That hasn't happened in a LONG time which made it even worse. Last night 24 started it's new season with Fox running two hours of it on Sunday and another two hours tonight. Jack is back from China and naturally all hell is breaking loose. At one point it caught me by surprise. We'd just flipped the channel over and what's on the screen? Something about a bomb going off in San Antonio. "A bomb went off in San Antonio? Seriously?" No, just part of the show. I guess they started a couple minutes early or I was slow in switching over.

Last night was also the start of the new season of Rome. Love that show too. Last season pretty much showed everything leading up to and including Julius Caesar's death. Last night we started the aftermath. Not sure how much ground it'll cover. Probably up through the whole Antony and Cleopatra bit.

Katya is dreaming about something good. Her tail is wagging VERY fast. She's not twitching her feet though so I guess she's not chasing something. Just wagging that tail in her sleep. She's such a happy dog :-)