Category: Personal

Day-to-day life and other ramblings

Cache Creek

We wanted to do something more than just going to dinner for our upcoming anniversary, so yesterday we took a day trip to Cache Creek indian casino, which is about 2 hours away, outside Sacramento.

We headed out a little before 10 am and got there just before noon. It was a sunny, warm day, a nice day for a drive. We were fortunate to have good radio reception almost all the way there, so we were able to listen to all but the last few minutes of Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me!, which was a particularly good episode, too, with Drew Carey on the panel, and Moby as the guest, both of whom were hilarious.

Anyway, Cache Creek has lots and lots of parking, and is in pretty much the middle of nowhere. After getting off the freeway onto Route 16, we drove through some truly small towns: Madison seemed to be little more than a general store a few roads; Esparto is bigger, and you drive right through their downtown, past their school and post office (note to self: they have a shaved ice stand along the way); and Capay seems even smaller than Madison, but features red-brick shoulders down their main street. But mostly it’s just farmland and grape vines. Pretty, but very, very rural.

We easily found parking in the garage and went inside. I took a couple of pictures of the lobby before a security guard came over and told us that we couldn’t take photos pointing the camera towards the casino. A little strange, but oh well. Their lobby is pretty impressive, though:

Lobby of Cache Creek casino

The casino is much the same as a Las Vegas casino, maybe about average by that standard (bigger than Bally’s, not as big as the MGM). It’s a big room of slot machines and tables games with restaurants around the edge, a nightclub/concert venue on one side, and a large poker room. To my surprise, they even had some penny slots. They also had video poker machines with better payouts than we usually find in Vegas.

We both played some video poker during the afternoon. I had a surprisingly run of luck, getting four-of-a-kind twice. Debbi was not so lucky, which is too bad since she plays a lot more video poker than I do. She could use a run of luck.

The main disappointment for me is that I had heard that they have no limit Hold Em here with 1/2 blinds, but when I asked they said they only had 2/4 blinds. Since I haven’t played NLHE except with my friends at our home games, I wanted to start at the lowest blind structure when playing in a casino. Oh well. Also, one of the room managers told Debbi she couldn’t stand behind me and watch me play one time when she came in, which is different from every other room I’ve played in. I’m not sure what the motivation was there, but whatever.

Anyway, I played 3/6 limit hold ’em instead of no limit. Which even though I ended up down a little was a lot of fun. I made full houses three times and won a number of other hands, going on quite a roll in the middle of the session. Unfortunately the winning stretch was bracketed by a period of making the second-best hand a bunch (a good way to lose a bunch of money), and a card-dead period. I would have finished up a little except that twice a woman managed to make her flush on the turn or river to beat my flopped two pair. But, that’s the way it goes.

We didn’t try any of their sit-down restaurants, instead doing the grill and the deli. The grill was pretty good, the deli was pretty mediocre. The dessert place served great milkshakes, though.

The drive home was uneventful (setting aside the amazing number of bugs which hit my windshield), and we got home almost exactly 12 hours after leaving in the morning.

There’s not quite enough to keep us occupied there for a whole weekend, so I’m glad we didn’t get a room to stay for the weekend, but it should be fun as a day trip a couple times a year. I think leaving just a little earlier would make the trip a little smoother, but this trip went well, and we had fun!

Weekend Wrap-Up

That’s another busy weekend in the books.

Saturday I suggested that we go play minigolf. We ended up making it a little date afternoon, having lunch at City Pub, then golf at Malibu. Then we drove up a little farther to Redwood Shores where we tried out the Milkshake Werks which was quite yummy, and recommended for anyone who’s not getting enough ice cream in their diet. I actually found this place because we recently got a card at work with which we can get discounts at many area restaurants and services, and they were listed at the card’s web site. I probably would never have found it otherwise! Good deal.

Sunday was the final tournament of this year’s ultimate frisbee season. It was cool, sunny, and quite windy, which made for some very long points and erratic throws. I didn’t play my best, but I had a good time anyway. Our team won a game by 4, lost a game by 4, and lost a game by 1, so we were pretty much the average team. I was wiped out by the end, but then I always am if I play the whole tournament. Debbi came with to watch me play, and we stayed for the post-game barbecue. At home we collapsed on the couch for a while; I ended up getting a little sunburned during the game, which probably wiped me out even more than just running around.

In the evening I managed to get up long enough to put together a bookcase we bought Saturday at Ikea to replace some plastic cubes we’d been using to store some stuff in the corner. It fit perfectly and gives us a little more space to store things. We’re definitely getting a little cramped in my house, and are thinking a little about looking for a new house, although not really doing anything about it yet. (The main deterrent for me is not getting a new house, but preparing the old house to be sold. I predict it’s going to be a pain in the ass.) Anyway, we keep doing little reorganizations and getting rid of stuff and it’s worked out so far. But it’s a temporary solution.

We both ended up coughing a bit in the evening, and today Debbi reports that she feels like she’s coming down with a cold, which is no fun. Hopefully it will blow over quickly.

I remembered to do some stretching last night, so I wasn’t as stiff this morning as I usually am. I could still use a walk to limber up the muscles, though.

For my next trick, I’ll start biking in to work again!

Dinner with Trish

Went to dinner tonight with my friend Trish. Trish is another one of the “olden days” journallers, having started her journal, Rant and Rave, back around the same time I started Gazing Into The Abyss. We became friends when I moved to the area, and I introduced her to her “evil twin” Lucy, and they became fast friends. Trish moved away a few years ago to be with her boyfriend, then moved back here last year, and this is the first time I’ve seen her.

We went to Cascal, a local tapas restaurant I haven’t yet tried! Very yummy! Expensive, though!

Trish was her usual cheerful-yet-smartassed self. I think she’s happy to have a job in the tech sector and not to have the godawful long commute she had the last time she lived here. Plus she has two cats, which makes her happy. She’s more in touch with many of the “old time” journallers than I am, so I got the scoop on some people I haven’t heard from or about in years. And mostly we just caught up on what we’ve each been doing for the last few years.

We should do this again sometime.

Times Past

During my ongoing project to clean out the front room and closet, I came across this wipe-off calendar from 1999:

Calendar from 1999
(click for larger image)

Back when I was working at Epic in Madison I had an Apple Newton as my PDA, mainly to keep my want list (books, comics, etc.). But it was large and unwieldy for use as a calendar, so eventually I bought this 3-month dry-erase calendar and pinned it to my wall at work to keep track of my appointments.

Once I got offered my job at Apple, I used it to keep track of all the things I needed to do before I moved out: I had to finish up my projects at Epic, meet with people to transfer my responsibilities, pack up my stuff, get the cats prepped for their trip, and then fly out. And as you can see the month of February is planned out on the calendar (and then I wrote about it in more detail over here and here). What a crazy month. It’s still hard to believe it went so smoothly.

Well, at least I remember it went pretty smoothly.

Fitzy’s Special

An exchange while eating my home-made tacos tonight:

Me: I could make these more often, you know. They’re scrummy!

Debbi: “Scrummy?” Is that, like, scrumptious and yummy?

Me: Yup.

(pause)

Me: It sounds better than “yumptious”.

The taco recipe, by the way, comes from an ex-girlfriend. “Fitzy’s Special”, she called it. It’s ground beef, refried beans, browned onions, and spices, served in tortillas or taco shells. If I ever hear from my ex again, I’ll have to tell her how much Debbi loves it. (Okay, maybe that wouldn’t go over so well.)

The tacos are one of the few things I cook which I can make in 30 minutes or less. A lot of recipes I make take several hours, especially the Indian food which takes 30-60 minutes to prep, and then 2-3 hours to simmer. It’s scrummy, too, and makes several meals’ worth of food, but I pretty much have to make it on the weekends.

Gee, I oughta make some sometime soon!

We Got Him

Yesterday was my friend J.’s 40th birthday. J. is on a pretty close-knit team in my department, but they also have this comically adversarial relationship with each other, playing practical jokes on each other and so forth. J. had made the mistake of letting slip when his birthday was, so yesterday at 2 pm his cow-orkers D. and L. gathered a bunch of people together and we all surprised him by walking up to his office singing Happy Birthday. L. even bought a cake and got it inscribed “Happy Birthday Old Man!” 🙂

J. is someone who appreciates some good verbal abuse jousting, so we made sure not to let him down on that front. It’s almost too easy since D. and L. are both recent college grads. At one point D. and J. were sitting in adjoining chairs and I said, “It’s like you two are the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures.”

Tonight hopefully I can further celebrate J.’s birthday by taking some of his money at poker!

But seriously, J. is a good guy, a fellow science fiction geek, and I wish him the best. Especially if doing so means he won’t pull the same thing on me on my 40th!

Time Flies By

I can’t believe how fast this weekend went by. How fast? Well, it’s already Tuesday!

Friday night we finished watching season three of Doctor Who, as I posted a few days back, but that was just the warm-up.

Saturday afternoon we went to a baby shower for Susan and Subrata, who are expecting their first in a couple of months. It was a lot of fun, with about 30 people there and lots of good food. Our friends Chad and Camille hosted at their house, and everyone ooh’ed and aah’ed over their remodeled kitchen (we’d seen it before, but it was new to a lot of people).

Of course, we also ooh’ed and aah’ed over Susan and Subrata, who had a blast receiving gifts and seeing friends. Subrata’s parents also attended, having flown in for the weekend. They’re very excited about having their first child and have been getting their house ready for the new arrival. So everyone had a great time.

Then Sunday we got together with S&S and Subrata’s parents to go to the double feature at the Stanford Theatre: North by Northwest and The Trouble with Harry. NxNW as I’ve said before is one of my very favorite films, maybe my favorite. I’ve seen it so often that I’m well past the point of getting something new out of it on each viewing. This time around I think I enjoyed the scenes with Martin Landau in them the most, although the airplane scene is always terrific.

I thought I’d never seen The Trouble with Harry, but it soon started to seem very familiar. In fact I saw it back in 2000. It’s what passes for a comedy in Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre, and it’s certainly one of his lesser films. Pretty to look at and with snappy dialogue, but it moves too slowly and the ending is just too unbelievable. Shirley Maclaine does a perfectly quirky turn as the female lead, and John Forsythe reminded me strongly of George Peppard for some reason. Not exactly essential viewing, but a nice try.

We went to P.F. Chang’s China Bistro for dinner, which we’d never been to. I guess I’d always suspected it was overpriced mediocre Chinese food, but it’s actually tasty, Maybe slightly expensive (though in the Bay Area who knows what that really means?), but it has just a hint of fusion flavor while still being essentially a Chinese restaurant. We consumed everything in sight and had a good time. And celebrated Subrata’s mother’s birthday, to boot.

All of that explains how the weekend could fly by so quickly. Since then it’s been work, bill-paying, ultimate and preparing for our fantasy baseball draft which has occupied my time. No doubt it will be Sunday before I know it!

Bonus Long Weekend

I’m taking a long weekend this weekend, which is nice. A little extra time to relax, and a lot of extra time to get stuff done around the house. Not to mention reading Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin for tonight’s book discussion group. (Review forthcoming, natch. 🙂 )

A couple of strange thing happened on Friday. First, I had a lot of trouble getting through to Debbi at work. At first I suspected my cell phone, but after calling around a little I realized it must have been her work phone. Sure enough, later she told me that their phones had been down for much of the day – along with their Internet service. How frustrating!

More directly annoying to me was getting a call from my bank (on the home answering machine) that they have reason to believe my ATM card has been compromised, and they’re sending me a new one. What made this strange was that the time on the message on the machine was the exact same time – to the minute – that I’d been taking money out of an ATM, 5 minutes before I got home. I called my bank and it seems that that was sheer coincidence; apparently they had several hundred cards flagged this way, so I’m just part of a mass event. No word on exactly what happened; I don’t use my card for anything except ATMs (I’ve never used any card I’ve ever owned as a debit card), and I haven’t lost the card. So it’s possible that my card actually hasn’t been compromised, but they’re using some algorithm to identify cards which “might have been”, somehow, and mine happens to be a hit for whatever algorithm they’re using.

Anyway, assuming the new card arrives on time and nothing bad happens in the meantime, then it won’t be anything worse than a little extra stress. Still, kind of annoying.

Otherwise we’ve been taking care of things around the house and running errands, as well as going for a bike ride. The weather has been sunny and close to 70 degrees out, which after all is why we live here, right?

Oh yeah, and last night we went out with Subrata and Susan to catch a Hitchcock double feature at the Stanford Theatre. The first show was To Catch a Thief, which I first (and last) saw in 2002. I’d forgotten how whimsical it was, how snappy its script was, and I enjoyed seeing it again more than I’d expected. Of course, I always enjoy seeing Cary Grant – and Grace Kelly ain’t bad, neither.

The second film was Dial “M” For Murder, which I’d never seen before. It’s a sort of locked room mystery, except that the viewer knows exactly what happens, indeed gets to see the plan, execution, and aftermath of the whole thing. Former tennis star Ray Wendice (Ray Milland) married rich girl Margot (Grace Kelly). He later learns that she still carries a flame for her American friend Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings), and resolves to do her in to inherit her money. To this end he blackmails a ne’er-do-well college chum, Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson) to kill her. Things go badly awry, but he then manages to set up a last-second frame to throw suspicion away from himself, while Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams) looks into things.

The film almost entirely takes place in the Wendice’s flat, making it a small-cast suspense flick. Wendice is cool and calculating and seems to have set up the perfect murder, but Hitchcock manages to squeeze every ounce of suspense out of the film, by having trivial things go wrong with the event followed by one really big thing, followed by the characters circling each other – with little idea of who knows what – as they pursue their own agendas. The whole puzzle hinges on a single fact, and I’d expected it would be something cheesy, yet it turned out to be an elegant and entirely sensical fact.

The film’s downside is the wan acting; no one here manages to rise above the level of a cliche character, although Dawson as the hired gun does his darndest to give him a little depth and uncertainty. Kelly, in particular, sleepwalks her way through the role and seems almost unrecognizable compared to her role in Thief.

Still, despite its limitations the film is overall a win and I’m glad I saw it.

Happy Leap Day!

Wow, I really have not written very much this month! My head just hasn’t been in a journalling space, I guess. I have at least 3 half-written entries which I should really finish and post sometime soon. I just always seem to have other stuff to work on.

This past week a lot of my time has gone into doing stuff around the house. For instance, when I cleaned out the front closet over the Christmas break, I left four boxes of stuff sitting in the front room waiting to be gone through and mostly gotten rid of. Last Sunday I spent several hours upgrading the desktop computer to Mac OS X Leopard, and while it was chugging away at that I shredded boxes of old checks, pulled out and shredded pages from old APAs (mostly ones with my old addresses on them) and then chucked many of the APAs.

(Perhaps some of my old APAhacking friends are scandalized that I would be doing such a thing, but alas my sentimental attachment to boxes full of paper has waned in recent years, especially for the APAs that I was only sorta-kinda involved in, mainly in the mid-to-late 90s. I don’t expect to ever read these things again, and I don’t want to keep lugging them around, so out they go. Ditto some fanzines from the mid-90s, since I was never really part of fanzine culture.)

I’ve also been cleaning up and cataloguing my Magic card collection (which I think makes Debbi roll her eyes whenever I buy new cards or work on them). I went through and chucked a whole bunch of computer-related packing material (such as the boxes our wireless mice came in), books and CDs of software, as well as various other odds and ends. So things are generally looking a lot cleaner up there.

But between stuff like that, and gaming, and poker, and reading, and comic books, that just takes up a whole lot of my time.

And now I have this year’s Baseball Prospectus to read, and fantasy baseball season to prepare for, and a variety of housework to take care of, and movies at the Stanford Theatre to go see, so my March looks at least as busy as my February.

At least it’s been bright and sunny and warm out lately. Always nice to be able to move to short sleeves and start being active outdoors at the beginning of March!

I’ll try not to neglect the journal quite so much next month, though.