Gathering?

I didn't end up going to see Book of Mormon, they were sold out and I didn't get there early enough to get in the stand by list. It's probably better anyway because I was really tired and ended up taking a nap before dinner. I ate at a place across the street from the hotel and got some very tasty scallops. It ended up being a pretty laid back night, after dinner I went back to the room and watched Glee and putzed around the hotel for a bit before heading to bed.. I know, very unlike me to not go wander.

Spent Thurs and Friday getting ready for FI because I always tend to wait till the last minute when doing that stuff, I will be making a concerted effort to change that. In that realm I am planning on working on my armor on Monday, I want to fix the straps (they broke during game and had to be quickly patched with thread and duct tape) and add back holsters for shot guns. My new additions to it look really cool, go check flickr for some pics I took while at FI.

Left for DC right after game on Sunday and it took me forever to get here, got stuck in Manhattan due to construction and didn't get to hotel till almost 4am. Monday and Tuesday have been low key, get out of class, nap, eat, sleep.. Monday night I tried to get new shoes at REI but they were out of my size and ended up eating a shrimp and crab dish at a placed called Coastal Flats near REI. The guy at REI called the store in Conshohocken PA and they have one in stock and on hold for me. I am going to go there on the way to Laire on Friday. Last night I had a hankering for some red meat so I called around to find grass fed steaks, I found one place that is mostly grass fed (Capital Grill) and another that has 100% grass fed burgers (Clyde's). I opted for the burger which I think was a good choice, I got a tuna/salmon tartar appetizer and a bacon/pepper jack burger. After dinner I watched the season finale of Glee, it was ok but they spent too much time on the "oh look we're in NYC" and not enough time on the competition.

I am finally not feeling super tired although I can't say I slept well last night, I'm not loving my Sheraton experiment and may be going back to Marriott soon. The beds are not as comfortable and the bath tubs seem to be very small, at first I thought it was just the NYC one that had a small bath tub, but this one does too. Plus it smells like a cheap whore in the hotel lobby, elevator and hallways. At first I thought I must have been walking behind some girl who was over perfumed but I can't imagine every time I walk around I'm following the same person. The hotel must just use it as an air freshener.. I'm certainly wishing I was at the Courtyard or Residence Inn which are both a block away.

Don't know what I'm doing tonight, but there is a place in DC running a double feature of Nausicca and Spirited Away, they serve food and have happy hour prices on drinks. I will see what time I get out of here if it's worth going into the city.

I was trying to decide on my Thurs night / Friday plans. I ended up deciding to check out of hotel tomorrow morning and then drive to Philly after class. This is a benefit in many ways, one - and most importantly - I won't have to deal with DC traffic on Friday morning of Memorial Day Weekend and, two - it will put me closer to REI and eventually Laire, three - there is a Celtic Music Faire in Philly tomorrow and The Gathering is playing a 10pm show at a college, if I can get out of here early enough I can drive up to Philly, hit REI and go to faire/concert.

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In other news - Fuck you Fred Wilpon! As the owner of a team you have the final say on the decisions your team makes, don't act like the Mets are a punishment that has been tossed upon you and don't sit in an interview talking about how one of the best players to ever wear your team's uniform is a bum. Up until yesterday I was on his side in the Madoff scandal, but not anymore. Don't get me wrong, Wilpon cares about baseball, but his alliance is clearly towards the Brooklyn Dodgers. Maybe the new owners will remove all the Dodgers shit from our stadium and replace it with Mets stuff. Earlier in the year Bud Selig had MLB seize control of the Dodgers who were having problems paying their payroll, they are not nearly as in debt as the Mets who have taken out millions of dollars worth of loans from MLB and still can't pay payroll. ESPN had a great article on this today and went on to say how the only reason Wilpon has not been removed by MLB was because he is friends with Bud Selig.. I say they both need to be out of baseball.

PMGA

Did you know there was a Professional Mini Golf Association? I did.. Years ago when I was in Irvine looking for good mini golf I was led to this group, it lists all the professional grade mini golf courses across the US. Anyway, I had some time to kill on Friday before my flight and it was amazingly nice out so I decided on some mini golf, after doing a quick search on the google I found a bunch of local ones. To narrow down the field I checked out the PMGA website, I found one in the Cleveland area which happened to be right near the airport.. Memphis Mini Golf is it's name in case you're every in Cleveland and have a hankering to play some mini golf. I got there and was slightly amazed at the shabby appearance but shouldered on.. It's a Memphis Kiddie Park which has little rides for kids and even a little roller coaster, tucked into the back (have to walk through lots of lame kiddie areas) is the mini golf section. I'm glad I shouldered on because it was a lot of fun! I would say the course was moderate difficulty with a few easy holes and few pretty hard ones. I ended up shooting 2 over par..

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Flight back was pretty quick, I got a call while I was in Cleveland airport telling me my connecting flight (Cin to Hartford) was delayed but when I landed in Cin I found out it was back on schedule.

Got up too early on Saturday and went to the Robin Hood Springtime Festival, the story shows were very good but the overall faire experience was dampened by the cold, damp weather. I was supposed to go back on Sunday but the weather was even worse so I opted to just hang out at home. It's a shame really because I would have loved to spend more time there and see a few of the shows I missed out on but the thought of another day in cold rain was not appealing to me.

Speaking of cold and rain, I went to the Mets game last night. The game was supposed to start at 7:10 but the game had a 90 minute rain delay to start, the annoying thing about that is it was not even really raining. There was a light drizzle and the weather man called for big rain which never came. I'm very happy with my new seats since they are undercover and have a wall behind them which kills most of the wind, I'm not so happy with the guy who sits next to us. He is one of those guys who has no care about others around him, he splayed out with his professional size score book and was constantly tossing his peanut shells on whoever sat next to him. Unfortunately he also has the Sunday plan so I guess we will be dealing with him for the remainder of the season.

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I'm teaching in NYC this week and am debating trying to get tickets to see Book of Mormon tonight, they have a lottery to get cheap seats, you need to get your name in 2 hours before the show so hopefully I can get out of work early enough. If I can't I am not going to pay full price because it's an expensive show to go see alone.

This week I was supposed to be home teaching online but got called last minute to be here in NYC, next week I'm supposed to be off platform but just got a call and am needed in either DC or Dallas next week. I chose DC because I can at least drive there Sunday night as opposed to getting a flight.

PNC

Yesterday I went into Pittsburgh to see a Pirates game at PNC Park, class got out early so I was able to get into town around 4:30. Pittsburgh is a very pretty city, and Hoyle told me I must go up the Duquesne Incline which is a trolley car that runs up the side of a big mountain. I parked at the stadium and walked over the rivers to the incline. The ride up was very fast considering the amount of distance it covers and the age of the trolley. At the top I walked around, grabbed a beer at a tavern and took some great pictures using the Droid X Panarama Assist feature (go over to flickr and check them out). After some time up there I can back and headed over to the stadium. The stadium like the rest of the city is very pretty with lots of sort of meandering paths, the concession stands a bit hidden kinda like stadiums of yesteryear. One thing I really loved about the stadium is that when you walk in they give you a program which includes a map of the stadium with a list of ALL food items and at which gate you can find them, even knowing the section sometimes you had to look around or even ask the locals where the booth was. Also included in the program were the starting lineups and a scorecard!

I ended up getting a gyro for dinner which was great followed by some perogies which were certainly not great.. Whoever heard of steaming perogies? They were a big pile of glop and not at all enjoyable. Grabbed a PNC Dark and headed up to the seat. This was the first stadium in a long time where I got the feeling of awe when walking out to seats, the view of the stadium with the city in the background and the bridges was just an amazing site. If you ever get out to PNC sit in the upper deck, you get a much better view of the city, bridges, river, etc from there. The game was good, 0-0 till late and a final of 2-0 in favor of Dodgers. Met some really awesome people at the game, one older gentleman who was retired after working for the NYC transit authority and a younger couple who had moved from NY a few years ago.

I'm not sure what I'm doing tonight, certainly going to do something outside, it's so warm and sunny out..

Symon Says..

Last night I went downtown Cleveland to Lola's Bistro which is Michael Symon's restaurant. I've been there in the past before he was an Iron Chef but I figured I'd go back on the company dollar.. :)

The Indians were home last night so traffic was a lot worse and there were people in the city! Lola's is about 2 blocks from the stadium so parking was non-existent, luckily Lola's has valet parking so after driving around for a few minutes I gave in and let them valet the car. I went in and asked for a table, I was told the wait was at least 90 minutes but I could get the full menu at the bar. The bar didn't have an empty seat so I went back to the podium to put my name in. As I was at the podium a group of 3 came in for a kitchen view table, the kitchen view area is a bar facing the kitchen that has 8 seats, with this group there would have been one open seat so the manager said I could sit there if the group of 3 was ok with that. The group of 3 were 2 ladies and an older guy there on business. We chatted for a min and they said sure.. :-)

I sat down and started looking at menu and there was no drinks which I thought was odd. I already had my dinner choice narrowed down to two choices, which was the "Wild Salmon with chicken confit, red wine mustard sauce, hash brown salad" and the "Scallops with sweet pea tart, lemon, pancetta, carrot" so there was little to look at on the menu. The waitress came over with a iPad which had their drink menu, it was very cool to browse the drink menu on that. I watched the guys cook for a while before deciding on the Salmon. The Salmon was perfectly cooked but the hash brown salad was the high point of the dish. For dessert I had a Passion Fruit Parfait with caramelized white chocolate, passion fruit granita, micro basil. All in all the meal was a mere $80 with one glass of wine, valet and tip.

After dinner I wandered around since the city now had some form of population, apparently the game was rain delayed so a bunch of people who had not gone into the stadium yet were hanging out at the bars. Btw - it was NOT raining so I don't know why it was in a rain delay. I hung out for a bit before heading back to the hotel. On the ride back it rained a little.

The title of this blog is in reference to a shirt they were selling at Lola's, on the front it says Symon Says, on the back it says "Live to Cook".

Cleveland Rocks?

I am teaching this week in Cleveland, I went out last night to downtown to grab food. Happy Cow led me to a vegan restaurant called the Flaming Ice Cube but the address in Happy Cow was slightly off. I got into downtown and when the GPS said I was there I was in nowhere land. I plugged the restaurant name into my GPS and found it two blocks over. I was in Cleveland in the past and was amazed at how much of a ghost town it is, I found the same thing to be true last night. There was nobody walking around and no cars driving either, aren't there supposed to be people who live in the cities of America?

Anyway, went to the restaurant and had a delightful mock buffalo chicken sammich with some corn and red bean salsa. After dinner I figured I'd walk around a bit and try to find civilization, I found a two block area of population signaled by a one legged man playing a saxophone. When you're in a city and already feeling like the last survivor of the Apocalypse the last thing you need is the distant sound of a saxophone. Life is nothing but an adventure so I of course headed towards the sound, when I got closer I saw the above mentioned one legged man standing on a street corner belting out his tunes. The corner he was standing on was the beginning of civilization and that lasted exactly two blocks. Lola (Michael Symon's Restaurant) is in that area so I will probably be going back tonight. I went into a local bar and hung out with a beer before heading back to hotel. I had Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy which is a lemon aid / heffe mix, it was surprisingly good but very tart.

I can't possibly talk about Cleveland without talking about my flight here.. I flew from Hartford to Hate-Lanta, when I landed in Atlanta I found my flight to Cleveland was cancelled and they were proposing putting me on a flight in the morning which would have made me more than late for class. I went to the ticket counter and they told me they couldn't help me because they didn't know how to use the ticketing computer (yes, I'm smeggin' serious) and told me to call Delta's ticket number. I called and them and we found a flight that was leaving in about 10 mins to Cincinnati, at least it's closer than Atlanta, they put me on the flight and I returned to the same plane I just got off. I got off the plane and didn't even wait for the luggage to be unloaded, instead I went right to the computer kiosk and scanned my luggage tag, result - "go to agent". I go up to the lady and explained the situation and she calmly (and very slowly) looked up my bag tag and said my bag was in Atlanta and scheduled to fly to Cleveland in the morning (which I had told her already), then she, looking confused, said in a questioning voice "but you flew into Cincinnati?".. "Yes I did, I am going to rent a car and drive to Cleveland".. "That's a long ride".. Really do you think so! "Yeah, I know, can I just give you the address of my hotel in Cleveland to send the bag to ?".. "Hold on a sec, it looks here like I can put you up in a hotel and fly you out tomorrow on the 9am flight".. "no thanks, I just want to get on the road".. "ok, so you want me to mail the bag to the 20 Wicker St address?".. This went on for about 15 mins before I was on my way to the car rental place.. All in all it took over 90 minutes from the time I was off the plane to the time I was in my rental car, FAR to long in my opinion. I got a Hyundai Genesis which is a really nice quiet ride, the seats are very comfortable, the stereo has good sound and the car handles very well. You know what's open at ass o'clock in the middle of Ohio? Me neither honestly. I only stopped once and that was early on to get food, I tried to get coffee but those places were closed, instead I ended up with White Castle. Speaking of, they have a new Bacon Cheddar burger which was very good and my body didn't reject it as much as I had expected. Anyway, hours and hours later I made it to the hotel to take a nap before class. My bags did show up yesterday and were waiting for me when I got back to the hotel.

Did you know that Pittsburgh is only about 2 hours from Cleveland? I didn't.. Why does that matter? Because I'm going to see a Pirates game tomorrow.. I have heard PNC Park is beautiful, I will let you know.

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Other things...

I got the new Queen remastered CDs the other week, they are totally worth it. Each album comes with a second CD of extra stuff, those are take it or leave it, but the main albums sound so much better than they ever did before. They are much crisper and they really feel modern again. I can't wait for the next five to come out in June.

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I started a D&D campaign the other week, I had Becca take notes during the session so I can type up a recap / story. I am planning on posting that here and also in the Facebook group for the game. We are using 4th Edition and I have to say the game system is pretty nice now that they re-did a bunch of rules and added lots of races, classes, skills and feats. The only thing that I'm still unsure about is the ritual section, we shall see how that plays out in the next few sessions. When we decided on 4th edition I borrowed my friend Grim's books, after reading them I was stunned at how crappy the system was. I was complaining to Hoyle and he showed me his books which were totally different from Grim's first printing of 4th edition. In general I'm not a big fan of looking at books online (I know, how un-technical of me) but Wizards has a compendium which is actually pretty easy to use so I don't mind looking at that online. I guess the big difference is it's not a scanned in version of a book, it's a web interface into the rules.

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Sorry for the long blog, but this is what happens when I don't blog for a while.. :P

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The other day (like my specific time lines here) I was driving down to NY with Jessie. On the way down I was thinking about going to Dragon's Laire (gaming store in NY) to see what, if anything, they had for Heroscape and I started to think about certain people's obsession with board games..

When I was younger we had a bunch of video game machines (NES, 2600, Coleco, Intelevision, Master System, Vetrex) not to mention computer games but we were never overloaded with games. Maybe it's because games didn't come out as fast, maybe it was because there was not the internet where you can get instant access to stuff.. Either way, we would get a few games here and a few there but we never got a glut of stuff all at once. This gave us time to play, learn and enjoy each game before moving onto the next one. Around the time of the Genesis & SNES this started to change, more games came out each month and they were easier to get (didn't hurt that we had a hacker system set up and modded our Genesis and SNES to play pirated games as well as Japanese ones). The sheer amount of games made it almost overwhelming, like you felt bad for playing one game for a few weeks because there was always other games that you wanted to play and always new ones coming out. I think this is what led to things like cheat codes because if you wanted to see the end of a game but didn't have the time to dedicate you would just throw a cheat code in and you were invincible, this way you could polish that game off in a few hours and move to the next one. Now, I'm not saying choice is bad, but as a kid you just "gotta have 'em all" as they say, gotta have 'em and gotta play 'em all, gotta have 'em and gotta play 'em all at once, gotta have 'em and gotta play 'em all at once and gotta do it all today.. And why are kids suddenly being diagnosed with ADHD at alarming rates? Because there is too much to do and not enough time to do it. Enjoy that one game, let it enfold you, learn it's insides and outs and take the time to really master it. I'm not saying you can't play many different games but don't feel the need to play 'em all, there are so many wonderful things out there and of course we get the urge to want to see & do it all but just stop and really enjoy the moment, be it a game, meal, song, whatever. If you don't get my rant about games think about music, remember back when you only had a few albums, remember how well you knew those albums, now think about how that's changed over the years. Now you can plug an iPod in and transfer someone's entire music library, yes you now have a ton of great new music but will you ever really know those songs? There is something to be said for a little at a time..

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Phew, that was long winded... ;)

This weekend coming up is my birthday weekend. I will be at the CT Ren Faire Saturday (my birthday) and Sunday, hope to see you there..