Sooooooo behind

I'm SOOOOOO behind on blogging. The last few months have been really, really busy and it looks like it's not letting up until January. So, I'll have to post snippets when I can.

Major stuff that's been going on over the last few months:

• Went to San Francisco for Oracle Open World in October,
• Went to Belgium, Amsterdam & Essen, Germany with Chris & Jeremiah,
• Went to BGG.CON in Dallas,
• Went to the Bohemian Grove with Dave for Thanksgiving,
• Baked lots and lots of cookies, and finally...
• Have gone on lots and lots of dates, especially over the last month!

In between all that, I've been working, gaming, cooking, eating and trying to sleep! I'll have to post little tidbits about those adventures (plus any other little ones)!

From the TiVo to my iPod

I've been using the TiVo Desktop program for years. However, I just purchased the Desktop Plus program that allows me to convert programs from my TiVo at home to play on my iPod!! I'm so excited! I still haven't watched the Heroes premiere, so I've downloaded it to my iPod and I'm planning on watching it while I'm on the plane tomorrow morning, flying to Denver to see my sister! I'm so excited! I tested it out with an episode of Jeopardy and it works like a charm! This will be a great way for me to keep up with my TV watching when I'm on the go!

So far, I've transferred Heroes, Jeopardy! and Survivor: Gabon. I'm not usually a Survivor watcher, but Dave loves it so much, I gotta give it another looksie. We share the Amazing Race and Beauty & The Geek love, so I'm guessing I'll love Survivor too.

Day 3: Saturday

We met up with some friends for a BBQ lunch on Saturday. Davebo brought his kids and I sat near the kids' end of the table and fielded questions (mainly from Kate) like:

• What kind of food you would not want to have on a first date? (My answer: BBQ? but I wasn't really sure if that was a good answer. Suzie had the best answer which was spaghetti. Unfortunately, that was exactly what I had eaten the night before when we stopped at the House of Pies, so not sure if I looked messy or not...)
  
• What kind of food would you want to have on a first date? (My answer: sushi! All the kids agreed that sushi was a good answer and we chatted about what type of sushi we'd order...)
• What was my favorite NFL team? Was Shane upset that Brett Favre was retiring? (That one got a big "oooooooooogggh" from Shane when asked... But nooooooo, she's not upset! [sarcasm])

Those kids are so darn cute. After kissing Athens at lunch, I was teased (again, by Kate) with the "Stephanie and Athens, sittin' in a tree... K-I-S-S-I-N-G!" First of all, I haven't been teased with that particular song in about 25 years. Second of all, there apparently is an updated follow-up verse that goes "...and that's not it, that's not all, the baby's drinking alcohol!" Oh, taunted by an 8 year old... my weekend. Thou art complete.

After lunch, we headed over to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. It was my first visit. It's nice! Reagan is the first President that I really remember and I know surprisingly little about him and his wife. It was interesting to learn more about both of them. They seemed like remarkable people. We also went on board the Air Force One that was retired in 2001. That was neat. We took a picture before boarding AF1, but it's too cheesy to give prominent blog space to... check the flickr account if you're interested.

After the library, we went to the store to pick up snacks to munch on while we were at the Hollywood Bowl for the "Bugs Bunny on Broadway" show. It was so much fun. I haven't been to the Bowl in several years. The show itself was very entertaining too. The music was great and the cartoons were classics. He had a great time too, so I was really happy about that.

Overall, it was a busy Saturday, but fun and relaxing at the same time. While at the Hollywood Bowl, we were talking about how nice the weekend had been. The thing I was most surprised (and pleased) about was that he hadn't done anything to really annoy me! Which is saying something because I can be easily annoyed.

I was sad to see him go on Sunday, but really happy that he came out to see me and that we had such a wonderful weekend together.

Day 1: So far, it wasn't a fluke

He's almost been here 24 hours and it's confirmed. It wasn't a fluke, we definitely are still crazy about each other. His flight got in early and instead of arriving at 1:06 AM, he was off the plane, with baggage in hand by 1:06! I was glad to see him. I just love being with him. I swear, he keeps doing more and more things to make me like him that much more. For example, he made it so my second laptop talks to my new printer. It would've taken me forever to figure out how to do it and to be honest, I never would've. Instead, he printed something out from the printer and typed it in and installed the drivers and we were printing in less than 5 minutes!

We had plans to go eat lunch with Davebo because he wanted to meet Athens. Dave was also going to try to go. I got a call from him this morning saying that he was coming and I was getting a bonus Winton in the deal! So we all carpooled out to meet Davebo for lunch and had a great time. It seemed like everyone liked him and he liked them all so that was good!

Then we came home and took a nap and that was even better. Dave called that later and asked what we were doing and when I told him that we were taking a nap, he said, "A delicious afternoon nap! Ahhhh, that's the best part about having a boyfriend!!!!" And really, I don't think I can argue with him. Afternoon naps are the best... especially when you're running on just a few hours of sleep and have a full tummy from lunch.

Our plan for tonight is to go see Hancock at the Arclight and then go get something to eat. We'll be right next to Koreatown, so I think we might have to get some Korean food while we're there, especially since he has never had it before!

Agenda for tomorrow: Din Tai Fung and gaming/BBQ/swimming at Chris' house...

I let him talk me into rutabagas!

On my way in to Huntsville for Gulf Games, I stopped at Niki West's Steak and Seafood in Birmingham. It's a big cafeteria and I found it by calling Dave and having him check his "Roadfood" book for any points of interest in Birmingham. He gave me directions over the phone and it was so easy to find, only about a mile off of the freeway.

The food was pretty tasty. I had a fried pork chop and a few side dishes, my favorite being a broccoli, rice & cheese mixture. I let the guy talk me into rutabagas! I'd never had them before, but they were sweet, surprisingly.

It was definitely worth the stop and I'd go there again!

Here was my dinner:

Awesome Thanksgiving

We had an awesome Thanksgiving! I broke one casserole dish as I was drying it, but other than that, no major disasters!! In fact, everything was beautiful!

Here's a picture of my awesome turkey:

Roasted Turkey

This turkey was from Shelton Farms and it was a free-range, antibiotic/hormone-free turkey. It was delicious! And it was 24 pounds!! I could barely lift it into and out of the oven!

Here's a picture of the first table of side dishes:

Side dishes

We were all hungry by the time dinner was served, so a lot of it has food missing. Let's see we had yams with pecans, green salad, orange jell-o salad, pumpkin pie, vegetable crudite, M&Ms (peanut and plain, dark chocolate ones), green bean casserole, broccoli-mushroom casserole, deviled eggs (made with blue cheese and bacon), mashed potatoes, and yellow squash casserole.

Second side dish table

On the buffet, we had the turkey (beautifully carved by Stephanie R.), cranberry salad, creamed cornbread stuffing and bread stuffing.

I forgot to take a picture of it, but for dessert, we had four different kinds of cheesecakes (Snickers, 3 Musketeers, Reese's PB cups, Midnight Milky Ways), pumpkin pie, apple pie and pecan pies. All desserts were homemade and delicious!!!!

After dessert, we played some Guitar Hero (what else?) and had a great time with that. Shane played some Skipbo with various people too.

Here are some Guitar Hero photos:

Erin and Travis playing Guitar Hero

Erin and Steph playing Guitar Hero - hard song!

Steph playing Guitar Hero - we failed and got booed off the stage!

Dave and Steph playing "Rock this Town" - most likely since it's "our song"

All in all, a super fun evening with great food and great friends. Last year was the first year I didn't do Thanksgiving strictly with family. I think these last two Thanksgivings have been the best ones yet! I expect they will only improve in the future.

BGG.CON 2006 Recap

Well, I'm back from the BoardGameGeek convention. The #1 thing to say about it is that it was a blast!!! I slept a total of 12 hours from Thursday morning until I boarded the plane Sunday evening around 6 PM.

I won't list all the games I played because frankly, most anyone reading this just wouldn't care. And all my geeky friends know where to find the list of games I played, so, there.

Here's what I do know: I will be signing up to attend next year's con as soon as it's available. It was fabulous. I really liked the hotel room, but frankly, I might be tempted to cram a bunch of people in a room because all I did was sleep and shower in there. I spent zero time in my room. Maybe I will change my mind by next year, we'll see!

Highlights included:

Puzzle hunt: OMG, my friend Dave did a puzzle hunt for the con and it was fabulous!! I can't say much about it since he may run it again in SoCal, but it was REALLY fun. A lot of people complained it was too long and I could see that, but I didn't feel that way. We were probably around 3rd place or so on this one. We were SO close to finishing!! This was won by team Desert Meeple.

Frozen custard: We went out for dinner on Friday night after the puzzle hunt and then had some frozen custard. It was delish. I'm ready to have some more!

Game show: We participated in a Family Feud style game show (our team name was Meeple are Meeple) and we sat across the row from a team of two gamers from the SCB group (a fellow SoCal Group - their team name was Die, Fuggers!). We were talking shit to them all throughout the game, especially when we were in first place at the end of the second round. Unfortunately, they made a strong comeback in the third round and ended up coming in second place by only ONE point!!! It was so close. Those damn Desert Meeples won this too! And the sad thing is that we were beat by team Mangina (Derk, Ron, Jon and someone else I think) who consumed TWO bottles of wine during the show. Ugh!!! :-P

Final Score

Playing Werewolf: I had only played WW once at my apt. I played one game on Saturday night which turned into two games to three and next thing we knew it was around 8 AM on Sunday. So, Aaron says, "Well, there's no point in going to bed now, right?" He was absolutely right, consider the con ended at 3 PM, so I just said, "All right! Who's hungry?" We all piled into my rented SUV (thank goodness for that car!) and we headed out to Cafe Brazil for breakfast.

While we were there, Aaron offered $20 to anyone who would drink some of the pretty spicy hot sauce on the table. He had one taker who drank more than the required amount and paid for it for the rest of the morning. He did, however, get his $20!

Oh, and a quick side note, Greg had a WW playlist on his iPod for us to listen to while it was nighttime during the game. It was pretty cool.

Being mooned after a game of Time's Up: Yes, I saw Derk's ass on Friday night. 'Nuff said.