Tryptophan Began the Stand

Gin was already in our dining room by the time I got home, roughly an hour and a half early. It was, after all, the day before a long weekend and employers are more apt to suggest or be open to the idea of shortened days just before an extended leave. I have yet to quite parse the logic of that, but on the other hand I’m not sure I want to know since that would be uncomfortably close to biting the hand. I was rushing when I arrived; my early exit from work was choreographed with one purpose in mind: Get in some exercise before the food-oriented weekend.

Unlike most lunch hours, I had spent Wednesday’s noon break doing laundry and anxiously waiting for an important phone call that never actually came. But the early exit had left an opening prior to my normal quitting time and still before the scheduled dinner with HB and Gin. I raced to get my gym bag together and sprinted out the door, even overtaking Gin and Nik as they ambled out to make another bold attempt at shopping before dinner.

I met Doza in the parking lot, with unusually perfect timing, and had the foresight to double check about reserving a racquetball court at the front desk which helped since all but one were filled and several times during the match I caught some forlorn looking would-be player peering in through the small window in the door. The games were interesting; close, competitive and see-sawing back and forth in score. I won the first game by a single point after surrendering a fairly comfortable lead. The second game Doza won although it was my turn to rally back from a deficit. By the third game we’d played through 57 points, including a lot of long rallies and quite a few sideouts: We easily split 125 serves. I did manage to win the third game (and the match) with a startlingly simple realization that I tend to hit the ball too high up on the wall and give my opponents plenty of time to recover. By aiming a little lower I was able to score more points on the rally.

Still, it was a great match and I left feeling more than a little tired and more than a lot hungry. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant Gin and HB love called Jorge’s Tapatio. They have decent food, all you can eat hot tortilla chips and salsa, generous combination plates and pocket-friendly prices. Our town isn’t big on the dining selection, but if you want Mexican food, you have plenty of good options ranging from full sit-down fare like Jorge’s to little hole-in-the-wall Taquerias. Many of them are very good, too.

We got up fairly early on Thursday to get ready for the day. Nik and I called our respective parents on the drive over to HB and Gin’s place and then piled into Nikki’s Civic for the trek to San Jose and Thanksgiving feasting with Lister, Whimsy, RR and others. There were around 15 people there most of the day and long into the night. The dinner featured a Turducken (turkey stuffed with duck stuffed with chicken) and a 12-pound prime rib infused with enough garlic to stun a yak. In the end I think Turducken is a better concept than actual dish since duck is kind of an acquired taste (although I happen to like it okay) and chicken and turkey are sort of indistinguishable when cooked together and placed on the same serving platter. Which is not to say it wasn’t good, just that I was sort of expecting to see slices of turkey/duck/chicken hybrids and once I saw Lister trying to carve the thing I realized that was simply not an option.

As usual my favorite part of Thanksgiving was the side dishes: Green bean casserole, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, squash and buttery sweet rolls. I ate enough for several men my size and sort of regretted it the rest of the evening as we sat around and grunted at the TV while the Sharks managed to lose another game. Later we played Gang of Four in which I, of course, lost horribly but did manage to pull the GoF-equivalent to the Royal Flush: A Gang of Six Tens. There is no higher hand in the game, and I used it to hilarious effect against Lister’s smug Gang of Four Sixes. A momentary triumph, perhaps, but worth it all the same.

I drove home rocking to The Killers’ Hot Fuss which I’ve even managed to get Nikki rocking to and finally made it to bed around 3:30 am. Friday was supposed to be a much more productive day than it was. In fact most of what I got accomplished was a thorough cleaning of the house with Nikki’s assist and a lot of TV and video gaming. I certainly wasn’t about to go shopping, but I had sort of intended to do some other productive sorts of work that ended up not really getting done. Saturday Nik and I went to breakfast at Nation’s and then packed up for the overnight trip out to her mom’s surprise birthday party.

Surprise parties are a little baffling to me. On one hand, I see the appeal of having a big shindig in an unexpected way. On the other hand, people don’t seem to do them right, I don’t think. For one thing they always plan surprises for significant milestone birthdays. In this case, Nik’s mom turned 50 on Friday. As part of the act we had to make ourselves scarce that day, which made Thanksgiving up at their place a little impractical (hence the San Jose trip). But in order to pull all this off, we had to leave her feeling quite upset that we were “ditching” her on her 50th birthday. To me, nothing spells suspicious like having your whole family act like your milestone birthday means essentially nothing.

Also, the party was set up at a country club restaurant which HB’s dad (who is married to Nik’s mom) rented out for the night. In order to prepare the event, he had to convince her to go out to dinner for her birthday (a day late I might add). As of an hour before her extremely elaborate party she was begging her husband to just let her stay home and be low-key for the night. This seems like a pretty significant roadblock and one that is bound to throw more monkey wrenches into plans than people like to admit. You’d think that just including the guest of honor into the fact that there was going to be an event would alleviate some of these issues. Perhaps let the scope of the event be the surprise.

Nik threw me a surprise party a few years ago. Now granted, I knew something was fishy. I’m not stupid, although I am a bit spacey at times so when she got all insistent that I not look at her computer for a few months and she got very upset with me the night before my birthday when I dragged my feet about helping her clean the house (and I mean clean in a way that she never bothers with) I thought “huh, that’s weird.” She also went well out of her way to run the show for the whole evening, “We’re going to dinner here at this time and the movies there at that time and then…” Not that mind since I like to be a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. But the odd phone call to a friend on the way home from the movies struck me as exceptionally odd. And it got my radar up. By the time we reached our apartment, I was on the lookout for oddities so when I noticed her mom’s car in the parking lot I knew as I walked up the stairs.

And this is what I mean by surprise parties being weird is that they take all this extra effort and trouble for the planners which is bound to make the guest of honor suspicious and if it gets ruined by one little thing (especially at the last minute) the whole thing feels like a letdown. And I did feel badly for not playing off my surprise better. I was excited by the time I walked in the door, but the big grin on my face gave away that I knew what to expect. The point I’m making here is that I’m not sure who surprise parties really benefit. I understand their appeal in a theoretical sense, but their actual execution is so difficult and the payoff for the target is so fleeting, I wonder if it can ever be said to be worth all the effort.

Anyway, we all had a lot of fun and the whole weekend passed by far too quickly. It wasn’t until the middle of the night last night as I woke to get a drink of water that I realized how lucky I really am. Being thankful for things is sometimes a very abstract state: You realize you are grateful that you have family and friends who care about you, you feel fortunate to have enough of the things you need and there is a sense of relief that you don’t have to try and come up with stuff to feel blessed with. But when you get to a point where you can’t be certain what is going to happen in the next two hours you have to be focused on the things that are stable and are worthy of gratitude. I sipped the water and stared out the window at the early morning darkness.

The cat wandered up, bleary-eyed and mewing softly. My hand absently stroked her head and after a moment I put the water away and walked back down the hall and into bed. I pulled the warm covers up to my chin and shivered for a moment as the chill from the night air fled my skin. With a sleepy sigh, I gently kissed Nikki on her cheek as she slept. Thank you, I whispered in my mind.

Who Wants Some Links?

These are leftovers from Wednesday. What can I say, it’s leftovers all week.

  • TiVo, shortly after announcing iPod capability for TiVo2Go, seems to be suggesting that they might finally start supporting Macs. I want to believe, but the holdup has me wondering: They seem suspiciously reluctant to give a reasonable date and we’re talking about software that has, theoretically at least, been under development for over a year already. I think it’s safe to say that they did pretty much nothing on it up until this point and now that they finally see a compelling reason to support an Apple product (iPods with video) they have to scramble to deliver what they already should have made available.
  • So at first I was unimpressed with the XBox 360. Actually, not really unimpressed, just uninterested in actually acquiring one. New hardware such as the PSP, Nintendo DS and XBox 360 is, in and of itself, pretty mundane in my mind. But I am a gamer and when a game intrigues me, I feel the urge to obtain it and/or the means with which to engage such entertainment. In this case the launch titles of the 360, aside from the typically ho-hum graphical upgrades to a slew of popular sports titles, held—so I thought—nothing of note. Then I looked deeper into Perfect Dark Zero. There are two opposing forces at work here: One is that Rare has released nothing of note in a long time after originally being a very celebrated game development brand name. The other is that this game sounds like what I wanted from Halo 2: Online co-op, detailed multiplayer and an enjoyable single-player campaign. It is indeed the co-op that really sells the concepts presented here in my mind, which of course means that the previously mentioned means to an end does not just require my own financial sacrifice/investment into the next generation of consoles but a trusted companion’s as well. And that may be asking just a little too much this Christmas.
  • Okay, is it just me or do we need to stop acting like Wayne Gretsky is so special that he doesn’t even have to play by the rules? It was bad enough when he played at the end of his career and he got all those superstar calls (ie, some defender cleanly poke checks him and even though the “Great One” doesn’t fall the D-man gets a tripping call) but he’s getting them now as a coach? Come on.
  • So I have an OS X problem that I can’t solve. Specifically, HB wants to mimic a feature that XP has in which video files stored in a folder have their file icon represented by a screen capture of the movie itself. OS X does this with image files, but video files always default back to the filetype icon (MOV, WMV, etc). Even if OS X doesn’t support this natively you’d think there would be a way to script a folder action that would open the file, take a PNG cap of the first frame, save the PNG as the file’s icon and move on to the next file. Yet neither HB, I nor anyone else I’ve asked can seem to find something like this. I was tempted to try and write some Applescript to do this very thing for him, but I don’t know squat about Applescript. I did find this script which doesn’t do what I want but is sort of in the ballpark. Maybe it is useful for someone to modify? Alternately, if you know of any good Applescript tutorials, toss ’em my way.
Share:
  • Print this article!
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Netvibes
  • Reddit
  • RSS
  • Technorati
  • Twitter
  • Yahoo! Bookmarks
  • Yahoo! Buzz