The Wave

I spent almost all of Labor Day weekend in Omaha, NE for a wedding.  It was great fun.  My first time in Omaha.  I'll dive into the drinking and facebook statuses and food and dancing and fanciness in another post.  However, one of those wonderfully awkward moments happened at the airport on the way home.

On the last day that Annie and I were in Omaha, we were eating lunch with the bride and groom and the groom's brother and girlfriend, and some other peeps.  The groom's brother and I realized that we were taking the same shuttle from the hotel to the airport.  Ha.  That's funny.  We're like the same people.  (Except they were heading back home to Brooklyn, and we were flying to San Francisco.)

But then we asked what flight they were taking, and we pieced together that we were actually taking the exact same flight out of Omaha.  We had a layover in Chicago (yeah, look at a map, Southwest), and they had the same one.  We also learned that the groom's father was going to be on the flight with us.  Look how cute we are!

So, we all get to the airport.  Annie and I apparently run through the airport, because we were through security and at our gate in a few minutes.  (By the way, Omaha is the emptiest airport I've ever seen in my life.  It was almost creepy.  The TSA agents were lonely and wanted to be our friends.)  We sat down at our gate, and we ran into the groom's father within a few minutes.  We wondered how the groom's brother and sister had gotten so far behind us, which led Annie and I to realize just how quickly we move through airports these days.

There was also one last kicker we discovered.  For those that have never flown Southwest, it has open seating, and you just walk on in the order that you checked in.  For the flight to Chicago, the order we were in line was:
A40 - Groom's Dad
A41 - ~RoB
A42 - Annie
A43 - Groom's Brother
A44 - Groom's Brother's Girlfriend.
One big happy family.  Though it is half true to say that it all happened by chance, we were on the same schedule forcing us to check in after the wedding reception, so it's not too surprising.  Yet, why is it so difficult to make this happen when you actually try?

Anyway, I took off to the bathroom and to fill up my TSA-emptied water bottle.  Upon coming out and walking in front of my departure gate, I looked toward the hallway leading from security.  I saw the groom's brother finally coming through and he waved.  That's fun.  I waved back.  Then I turned to continue my way to my seat, and I realized the groom's dad was behind me.  I hadn't just been waved at.  Yet, there was no mistake in my 'standing in an empty airport terminal waving wildly at, what turns out to be, nobody' wave.  Awesome.  Why am I so awkward?

I mean, I totally understand.  I had just met the groom's father this weekend and I absolutely loved him.  He was kind and smart and nice and always smiling.  I'd enthusiastically wave at him on sight if he was my dad.  Especially if we didn't see each other often and we got to spend most of the rest of the day together.  Me on the other hand, I'd only wave at me if I had to.  (Most people have to, when I awkwardly wave at them across BART cars and public venues, lest they look foolish.  By most people I mean Annie.  I usually wave like a toddler, too.)

Not exactly related, but the same feeling.

Suddenly we all got our hands up...
~RoB

Drowning in a Taxi

I like to consider myself well-traveled.  And, for those people that I know who have filled their passports dramatically more than mine (since I don't have one), I can at least say that I feel 'urban'.  By that, I mean that I'm comfortable in large cities, and I don't really stand out like most tourists.  However, I've never really been comfortable with taxis.  I've always been a bus/subway/walker.  Taxis kind of intimidate me.  It was fun to find that Annie shared these feelings with me.  We found out when we had to hail one from in front of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco on Sunday.

Yep, I teach here on Sundays, and I needed a taxi.

The whole process actually wasn't difficult at all.  I actually found the new/hybrid taxi to be comfortable and really convenient.  Although, there was a glowing moment where my inexperience with taxis came to a screaming apex.

I had just danced for an hour.  Before that, I walked to the top of Nob Hill from BART (straight uphill).  I was kind of tired, and I was slightly dehydrated.  After we got settled in the taxi and the driver stopped at the next light, I reached into Annie's bag to grab her pink, stainless steel, water bottle.  You know, the kind where the whole top screws off giving you a wide mouth for gulping.  As soon as I was tipping it up to my mouth, the taxi sped off, having been giving access to do so by a friendly green light.

The water didn't just dribble onto my chin and shirt.  It splashed.  All over my neck, down my shirt, back of my neck, bottom of my hair, and in my nasal passages.  I almost drowned... in a taxi... drinking from a bottle of water.  Return to the beginning where I was already uncomfortable in taxis.  Now I feel like a noob.

The next time I am quietly judging (to myself) someone who looks cautious as they are stepping on an escalator, I'll try and remember that my taxi anxiety is no less ridiculous.

I'm lying.  I'll still make fun of people scared of escalators.  What is this, 1849?
~RoB

~RoB Rides Ann Arbor

At one point in Ann Arbor, I had this dream of taking pictures of me 'riding' all of the statues I could find.  I was even planning on including fountains (though I was going to climb on them after they were turned off for the season, and combine it with a picture of them running to make it look like I rode them while they were going).  Anyway, in my head, the series of photos were called "Rob Rides Ann Arbor".  In my laziness, I never got around to doing it, but I still think it was a great idea.  So, picture me on top off all of these, in all of my glory:

It all started because I really wanted to get on this one!

This lil' guy was #2 on my to-ride list.

Even you, puma.  Even you.

Anybody not ride the cube while in Ann Arbor?

Though I failed, Angel managed to pull off a photo sequence of his own, entitled Angel In The City.

Clockwise starting on the left, Angel gets his picture with the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, the Bay Bridge, the Ferry Building & Financial District, and from the top of Twin Peaks.

Isn't he cute? 

He did most of the trip with his mother while I was getting my hair cut.  I usually don't support the awkwardness of being crazy dog parents.  However, does this make up for him biting people at family gatherings?  Did I even tell you about how he bites people at family functions?
~RoB

Fu¢k Me.

I had a great time yesterday.  I came home to a fixed sink.  The plumber left the keys and we were able to find them.  We went to a Michigan Alumni Association Happy Hour in San Francisco at a swanky wine bar.  We met some really cool people, including a fairly recent grad who owns a sushi restaurant in the city, and he invited us to come check it out.  We are really excited to do just that!  (Everybody loves Annie and I.)  Fittingly, the person who was in charge of cheese at the wine bar was also a UM grad, and a good friend of one of the people at the Happy Hour, but he didn't know the event was happening, and they didn't know that they lived in the same city.  Long story short, we got a free, really cool cheese plate and he answered questions about everything.

We got home without getting rained on too hard.  We picked up Angel from Doggy Day Care late, but they didn't charge us extra.  We snagged a few slices from a delicious, local pizza place, watched gLee, and hit the sack.  Then, the alarm rang this morning.

I knew when Annie's alarm went off that today was going to be rough.  Something told me not to get out of bed (and it wasn't Annie, cuz she was damn near pushing me out).  It was my day to take Angel out and feed him breakfast.  This happens at 5:45am every morning, so we switch off like good parents.  We then, usually, go back to bed for 30 minutes or so (cuz it's the best puppy snuggling time of the day).

Well, I locked myself out.  Our roommate just returned from a trip to NYC to see her sister graduate from Columbia, and her mom was staying the night, and they got in really late, and she had to leave fairly early, so I felt bad ringing the doorbell to get Annie to come let me in.  So, I walked out in the road, picked up some stones, and started chucking them at our bedroom window.  It is impossible to throw stones at a girl's window without either of these going through your head: 1) "But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?  It is the east, and Juliet is the sun." or 2) any random scene from the John Hughes/Brat Pack movies of the mid-80s.

She came down to let me in.  Things were running smoothly (except the bathroom got all clogged up by the number of people in the apartment, as everyone was waking up).  I ended up having to skip a much-needed shower.  The real 'Fu¢k Me!' moment came when I went down to my car to drive Annie to work.  It didn't start.  My 2007 Dodge Caliber didn't fu¢king start.  Grrrr.

Two weeks ago or so, it started making funny noises, right around the time that I got a huge crack in my windshield.  I figured I'd just get all the fluids topped when I went to get my oil changed sometime soon.  I also figured I'd let the windshield go until it started to look dangerous.  I've been doing dramatically better with my money, but I just invested a fair bit into a super-secret self-improvement project.  I'm trying to hold off on investing money into my car, which is still fairly new and a trooper.

I guess that changes now.  I absolutely need my car by Saturday, for a fairly long trip.  This means I'll have to find money to have it towed, and have it fixed, and they'll probably want to replace my windshield, and we might as well do the tires/oil/everything else now.  Awesome.

I can't wait until we run out of oil, and I can bike to work every day,
~RoB

Winds are Changing

I used to be one of the luckiest people I knew.  While at Michigan, I:

• won cash at a 50/50
• won a digital camera
• won a DVD player
• Granny won (and gave me) a free trip for 2 to Las Vegas ($$, amazing room in Caesars, luggage, airfare, etc.)
• Pops won the lotto and bought me a new car
• won a pre-show Rent raffle in NYC
• won a pre-show Wicked raffle in Chicago
• Annie's sister was the 1st name pulled in a pre-show Wicked raffle in Los Angeles
• went to a free Ludacris concert and sat in the middle of the 4th row

Then I moved to CA.  It got so bad (which is probably regular-person luck) that I thought it must only happen 'east of the Mississippi'.  The worst moment was when I won premiere tickets to Mummy 3 from a Bay-area radio station, and when I took a group of friends, they handed out ~150 extra tickets and we didn't get it in.  I have reason to believe things are starting to swing my way again.  Here's why:

1. I think I'm going to pay off one of my credit cards (entirely) by the end of the summer.
2. I won 2 prizes out of 5 raffle tickets that I bought when seeing my roommate perform in San Francisco (tickets to another show & a psychic reading).
3. Yesterday, I got a free $130 tennis racquet.

Here's the story.  I bought a Babolat racquet from tenniswarehouse on crazy clearance in 2003.  It was a black/white, over-sized,  Power+, and I used it to win the Huron League Championship and to be named to the Monroe County Dream Team as #1 Doubles my senior year.  I'm getting back into tennis big time.  I took a bunch of lessons in my last quarter at UCLA, and I was playing regularly with one of my closest friends in L.A.  On Friday, I busted the strings on it (though I just had it strung in October).  I took it to Sports Authority, since it was the only place I could find nearby that restrung racquets.  (Yes, I spell it the right way, and not the American way, which makes it look like a gambling racket.)

Anyway, I got a call on Tuesday notifying me that while tensioning the strings to the weight I asked (3 lbs above the tension recommended by the manufacturer), they cracked my racquet.  Instead of blaming me for having an old, over-used racquet and requesting the tension to be higher than it's supposed to (all us tennis players do this), they offered to replace it.  I went there yesterday, and when a manager finally came out to talk to me he said "Grab any racquet on the wall. No limit."  This would be like winning the lotto if I was in a tennis specialty shop, but all the racquets at Sports Authority are pre-strung (note, not super-fancy).  Regardless, I got a brand new racquet to replace a racquet that I paid less for almost 9 years ago.

They even went so far as to refund my string and grip purchase since they "didn't provide those services".  So, I guess, technically, they gave me $160 (+ tax).

I'm obviously ignoring the premiere for She's Out of My League that I saw at Paramount Studios, or the free VIP Paranormal Activity experience I got at Hollywood's Arclight Theater that included free food and meeting the stars of the movie, and the silent auction I snagged for 50-yd line tickets/parking/chancellor's party at a UCLA football game, and everything else I've forgotten I've won in the past decade,
~RoB

St. Patty's Day in San Francisco

Let me start off by saying that I was never one to go over-the-top in my participation in St. Patrick's Day.  I don't drink beer, and I was really good about going to class to learn, not to make a drunken fool of myself.  However, this was my first year since turning 21 that I was not a college student.  It was time for me to let my hair down and party with everyone else, which I certainly managed.

I started by bringing a dozen mini-cupcakes to work.  I ordered them from one of my favorite cupcakeries from the SF Cupcake Challenge.  Annie and I each took a dozen to work, so we split an order of Peppermint Patty cupcakes and Guinness & Bailey's cupcakes.  I meant to take a picture of how cute they were, but I ate them too fast.  Peppermint patties do have a close place to my heart on St. Patty's Day, since I used to roam around with peppermint schnapps and chocolate syrup and make people get on their kneees for peppermint patty shots.  That kind of debauchery hasn't happened in years, though.

Skip ahead to the end of the work day.  Annie and I met at home, grabbed a bus to BART, and took off into the city.  We didn't have any specific plans, but we had heard that parts of the city get crazy, and we were just going to join the crowds.  We knew that we wanted to go by the Irish Bank, since it would be the epicenter of the Irish foolishness, but we didn't really expect to wait in line to get in only to wait for drinks while touching 30 other drunken frat boys.  And we didn't.  It was indeed crazy, so we walked around the corner to our first pub of the night, Rickhouse (though I called it Mickhouse until looking it up today).

Rickhouse: Irish flag means it's legit!

They had some crazy Irish whiskey concoction, so I ordered two, grabbed Annie a Guinness, and we found somewhere to stand while listening to Irish folk music.  Our bartender, though arguably drunk himself, had the cutest little Irish gettup on, complete with a bow tie and suspenders.  We finished and decided to progress somewhere else.  We got in line and walked into another Irish pub across the street.  It was so dense with people that we immediately walked back out.  (I'm gonna count this as the second place in our pub crawl, even though we didn't drink anything.  We drank enough later to make up for it.)

Annie had once played trivia at a place called Elephant & Castle, so we used our Smartphones to wander in that direction.  There were points where we thought of just following drunken groups of people, in hopes of catching up on the festivities, but they always walked too slow or got sidetracked.  Elephant & Castle is probably my new favorite bar, since it was huge and, for some reason, made me feel like I was back at Michigan.  (Not that it matters since I rarely go to the bar.)  Here's where things got interesting.  I just went for straight Jameson on the rocks, and Annie and I did shots of Jameson.  This place had March Madness on, so we were able to check up on scores and watch UCLA finish off State ('If you can't get into college...').

We might have done more shots, I'm not sure, but we then took off to find the Royal Exchange.

Royal Exchange Block Party

Apparently, the Royal Exchange gets a whole street blocked off (not just alleys like the Irish Bank).  It must have already been too much for SF denizens, because cops were there lining the streets.  Oh well, it looked fun, even though we couldn't find anywhere to get a drink.  We instead walked across the street to Embarcadero Center and found a bar on the 3rd floor where Annie once watched a Michigan hockey game.  (Strange that Annie sounds way more like an alcoholic at the end of this.)  What was important is that we ate here, but also drank more whiskey and beer, respectively.

Finally, our bar crawl ended at a place called the White Horse, where we found our roomie!  I got Jack on the rocks (I was sick of Irish whiskey), but I feel like people kept rotating drinks around so that I wouldn't realize that I wasn't drinking much of it.  I had a crazy craving for Mozzarella Sticks (good ol' Midwestern boy comes out), and took off by myself to find a diner.  The diner across the street was closed, so I went off to find another.  I remember walking in one diner, where there was a line, asking for something to sign my name on (meaning get on the wait list), but responded to the funny faces I was getting by leaving.  I eventually found a diner, ordered mozzarella sticks, and enjoyed them with ranch and a strawberry shake.

Somehow, when I walked outside, Annie and our roomie were there.  There might have been some texting involved.  They dragged me off to BART.  Here's how that went:

This is what I felt like.

This is apparently what I looked like (complete with a vest to look like a Leprechaun).

And these pictures pretty much sum up the rest of the BART ride (except our roomie got digits from a drunk guy playing mandolin [who also plays fiddle]).

Our roomie's friend was sober and picked us up at the BART station in Oakland to drive us home.  I may have offered to blow him in repayment of his transportation services...  Oh.  Though I don't remember it, Annie claims that at one point I was laying on the platform on my back, sprawled out, at the Powell St. BART Station.  If so, that's simultaneously disturbing and embarrassing (albeit awesome).

Hope you don't remember your entire St. Patty's Day either,
~RoB

P.S. Made it to work the next morning on time.  I felt great when I woke up.  Almost TOO great...

Holy Crapcakes!

I just came up with Holy Crapcakes, and I think it's brilliant.  I originally had shitcakes, but that doesn't really give the mental image of rows of delicious, colorful, miniature decorated cakes that I'm aiming for.  Yesterday was the SF Cupcake Challenge, hosted by Drink:Eat:Play.  I went to the one in L.A. last year, so I was disappointed to miss it this year, yet really excited to find out they were having one here.  For a long time, nobody was going to accompany me (I'm totally comfortable with solo gluttony), but Annie decided to come back early from Tahoe to join me.  However, she was going to be running late for the event, since she had a soccer match that morning.  I refused to wait for her, and headed over to the city by myself.

I got to the front door 20 minutes early and the bouncers turned me away.  (Yeah, it was a club that employed their bouncers for this event since alcohol was being served and it was 21+... but I kept picturing how amazing it would be for some fatty to lose control and require the bouncers to drag the swollen body out while they kicked and screamed and shoved cupcakes in their face.)  Anyway, I was like 12th person in line, and I started in immediately.  I eat as I walk, whereas most people save theirs in tupperware for later.  Hoarding is out of control in this country.

40 minutes into it, and I've destroyed all the cupcakes!  Nobody else came close.

Still smiling as Annie captures my last bites.

Blurry, sweaty, puke-faced & finished.

In total, there were 28 mini cupcakes at the competition.  2 of them were peanut butter, which I strongly dislike [a future post], so I skipped them.  2 of them were coconut, which I also dislike, but I still tried them (to be fair in judging).  So, I ate 26 mini cupcakes (I usually shove the whole thing in my mouth, but they're probably 2 bites for most humans).  Unless you've eaten that much sugar and fat in a short period of time before, you have no clue how intense it can be.  Annie showed up about 35 minutes after the doors opened.  I had 4 cupcakes left to eat.  I'm pretty much a sugar consuming machine.  I was only a little shaky, a little sweaty, and a little ready to dance around in a sugar-high rampage.  I (speedily) dragged her around the place pointing out my favorites as she quickly snagged up her own collection, while I threw back my final bites.

There are 2 categories in the competition, Traditional and Original, and you also vote for your overall winner.

I had 3 favorites, and they were all Originals, so it was tough to submit my ballot:

• Sea Salt Caramel from James & the Giant Cupcake [I voted for Best Original. They liked me so much that they gave me a T-shirt.]
• Chocolate Toffee Crunch from Sweet Petite [I voted for Best Overall].
• Basil Lemon Blueberry from Kingdom Cake [It would have won most unique, and I loved it, but it didn't beat the other two.]

Since I had to choose a Traditional, I chose:

• Gentelemen Prefer Reds from That Takes the Cake [They had the best frostings, the ladies there were super nice, and that's a solid name for a red velvet cupcake.]

My trip to 'Disneyland' came and went faster than you can say 'food coma'.  I had wonderful highs and lows for the rest of the day.

Before heading to cupcake-palooza, I think god sent me a message regarding what my life may look like in 20 years if I continue my lifestyle.  I ignored the message.  It was easy to ignore, since I don't believe in god any more than I do Zeus [another post I'm working on].  Anyway, the obese guy in front of us at Costco was purchasing 4 6-pack boxes of enemas.  I couldn't help myself and had to snap a picture.  (Later, when telling Annie about it, she admitted to not knowing what an enema was.  Poor, sheltered mountain-girl.)

Beyond Annie's pop and my peroxide, the green boxes are 6-packs of enemas.

We also went to Beach Blanket Babylon after the cupcake fest, which I enjoyed way more than I thought I would.  Every single person on stage was a great singer and superbly entertaining.  I'll let Annie fill in the details on her blog.  She's in charge of the mundane things, and I have to keep prodding her to write posts.

Such a good boyfriend,
~RoB