Deep in the Heart of Texas - July 18 - 23

I flew to Dallas on Sunday and met up with my friend Christine, she was a student of mine back in Chicago and we ended up hanging out that week a few times. Anyway she was waiting for me at the hotel when I arrived so I got changed and we went to dinner. Well, actually it was a bit early so we first went to the Stadium Cafe bar for a drink. Dinner ended up being at a micro-brew house that had opened up since last time I was there. The beer was just 'eh' but the food was actually really good. When I say the beer was 'eh' I'm being nice to it.. Christine actually didn't finish hers and I had to "down it" after I finished eating. We were walking back to my hotel room and walked by the comedy club which appeared to have an open showing, last time I was in town the comedy club was closed to the public for a best in texas competition. We went in and found that Jon Lovitz was doing a show that night, actually he was doing a show as we entered. The CC machine was already shut down and the box office was technically closed but they took some cash and brought us to a pretty close seat. The show was awesome!

Monday night I brought Josh to the Magic Time Machine, it was certainly not as cool as the first time. This time we had Wild Bill as our waiter and he might as well have been any generic dude. Not only that we were sat no where near the bathroom so I didn't get to see any cool bathroom heckling. The food was still amazing but the show was lacking...

Speaking of lacking shows, Tuesday night I went out with Josh and a few students to a Tepinyaki place, when the guy said "this one is japanese ketchup" I laughed till I realized it was ACTUALLY ketchup!! Then I was just sad.. The cook was very slow and did almost no tricks, and the ones he did do he did sub-par like the onion volcano. He absolutely killed the sprouts with soy sauce but he did an awesome job on the steak, scallops and shrimp so once again the food was great but the show sucked..

Wednesday we went to a mexican place and I had an amazing portabella mushroom burrito. It was an asian/mexican fusion dish, it had sesame seeds and a oriental style mushroom gravy.. So good! We didn't take advantage of it but when we arrived they had an avocado and some lemon on the table for you to make your guacamole. You could either make it yourself or have them make it at your table. We chose neither.. The chips they gave us were nice and warm and perfectly salted and the salsa was OMG amazing! I tried to buy some but to no avail.

Thursday I went to the Ballpark at Arlington to see the Texas Rangers.. I would rank the stadium pretty high up on the list.. What makes a good stadium? Food, view and ambiance.. The food - how about a bacon wrapped hot dog slow cooked over a bed of onions!? Not feeling that? How about some beef brisket, or a chicken fried steak sammich? The view - eh, I got row 1 in the upper deck and the bar was annoyingly in my view the whole game, I could either lean forward or scrunch down but I could not just sit normally without having the pitchers mound be blocked. If I was not in row 1 this would not have been a problem so I don't want to kill it on that. The ambiance - they have a giant kids play area behind center field complete with batting cages, pitching cages and a whiffle ball park. Unlike Citi-Field the lines were not crazy for the whiffle ball, probably because you had to pay ($1 per kid). They also had a statue of Nolan Ryan with all of his achievements in the middle of the kid play area. They had a Rangers Hall of Fame but it was closed due to a private party which sucked. The field level was very open and as you walked around the concession stands you got a view of the field which is nice, but the upper deck was not. The upper deck was the standard go through a tunnel to the food area behind the seats, I guess they all can't be Citi-Field.. My biggest knock on the stadium was the scoreboards, they looked like they were straight out of the 80s which does not make sense since it's a somewhat new ballpark. Before the game they did a great introduction with a song from each year the club was in existence with highlights playing during each song. Oh, and the awesome (or hysterical) thing was they played Deep in the Heart of Texas during one of the breaks! I laughed, then videoed the scoreboard!

Woke up FAR to early on Friday to get to the airport..

This week was Josh's co-teach for this class so we took turns teaching and watching.. Once he gets qualified it should free me up to do the Symm Config class more which is an online course which means more home time..

--Diversion of the Day