After the motorcycle class Adam, Tina, Amit, Jeremy, Steph, and I went to the Counter on California Ave. Steph and I got there first with Adam showing up just afterwards. Jeremy took another 10 minutes to get there, but Amit and Tina took somewhere between 45min to 1hour to show up. They stopped by Amit’s and got all cleaned up. It was soooo nice to be in the air conditioning and have some nice cold beverages after the day out in the sun with the Motorcycling gear on. I got the contradiction burger on spinach instead of the bun. It was delicious and I ate more than I should have. I didn’t feel too bad about it since I had had a long day and was pretty light for what I normally like to weigh.
On Friday I biked over to the San Antonio Shopping Center to get the boots for motorcycle riding class. I was able to get some cheap ones that were comfortable, along with a new set of sneakers. The old set of sneakers were falling apart and I could start to see my socks through the holes in the top of the shoe. They lasted a long time for $15 used shoes.
I met up with Steph outside of Milk Pail and we went inside for some tasty foods. We went back to my place after that and had some dinner of cheese and crackers with fruit.
Thursday night instead of going to games 6 of us went to a motorcycle class in Santa Clara from BikeSmart. It was Tina, Adam, Amit, Steph, Jeremy, and myself; mainly the group that is going to Thailand in November. The class was pretty slow and the instructor slowed things down even more. It probably would have take us about 1 hour to go through the book alone and then 1 hour to watch all the videos. Instead we slowly went through and took about 5 hours for the whole process. We all either missed 1 question or none on the test.
After the class we all went to BJ’s for some buffalo wings and dessert. It was all very tasty despite the service being terrible and the place being incredibly cold. Had it been full the amount of AC might have been appropriate.
The last day in Seattle Wit, Brian, Candice, and I went to breakfast at a waffle place. The waffles were soooo tasty, and I got the bacon maple syrup one. We then went to Pike’s Place Market and looked at all the various and odd things. There were a few fish stalls, flower stalls, and bakeries, but most of the rest of the places were knick-knack places. There was a really tasty chocolate pasta, but I would never want to cook with it since it would make a gigantic dessert.
We went to Yard house after the market and said goodbye to Wit along the way. At yardhouse we just relaxed and played a few games on Brian’s iPad. After a drink and some appetizers I hopped on the train for the airport and showed up a good number of hours early. Since I was flying through LAX I happened to be on the same flight as Ash so I talked to her and gave her Stephanie’s feedback on the video. The flights were non-eventful, and I was barely able to catch the connecting flight. It was on a twin turbo prop, which is something I wasn’t expecting. The plane still got me to SJC quickly. Steph was nice enough to pick me up from the airport, and we went back to my place. The kitties were happy to see me and I did a thorough cleaning of the bathroom before going to bed.
Friday was overwhelming at PAX. I’m not a big fan of crowds, and PAX seems to be nothing but crowds. I was able to handle it for a while, and did enjoy the indie mega booth. There are a good number of games that look very interesting. It is amazing to see the influence Clash of Clans and MineCraft have had on the games that indie developers are making. There weren’t too many original projects, but a lot of them did build well on top of well defined mechanics. The originality was certainly there.
I really liked the Pixel Junk Inc. game that Steph tried out, as well as Cannon Brawl.
I competed in the Goldeneye tournament and had a disappointing first round knockout. I’m sure I could have made it to the final 4 match, but the disparity in skill level made it more of a hunt than a match. The settings were also quite strange as the organizer had never played the game before.
Nick, Steph, and I played two pretty good board games. The first was a dice drafting, resource management game called Castle Dice. It was quite good, but not good enough to buy. We didn’t finish the game either, as the guy at the booth was just showing us how to play and implied that he didn’t want us to stick around and play it.
The second game was a very fast paced interactive dice roller. It was the next in the series of Space Cadets, called Space Cadets: Dice Duel. In this version of the game you are going up against another team, and you have to load missiles, get lock, and move to be able to shoot them. Then you must also dampen their lock, build up shields, and make sure they can’t shoot you. Steph, Erin, and myself won handedly both times over Nick and the two other guys there. We destroyed their ship without getting hit both times if I remember correctly.
Steph and I went to a really nice wine bar after that. We had several flights of wine (Sweet, Alsace, and Port) as well as some phenomenal desserts. We were joined later by Andrew and Nick. We were almost done at the wine bar, but we stuck around for a bit longer and had another desert with Nick.
This was quite a nice event. We played two different games while there. Dragon’s Crown and Mario for the Wii U. They were both incredibly chaotic games, and we didn’t do terribly well in either. Luckily they are designed for people who can’t play games that well. One is the hack and slash, and the other is a very forgiving platformer.
Jeremy made his famous dip, and also the elusive pizza dip. They were both quite delicious, and I ate way to much of both of them. He also had a nice selection of beer, and I got some more caps for my collection.
Yesterday I grabbed some quick coffee with Michael, who I hadn’t seen in about a year and a half. It was good to talk to him about his startup ideas and how he is going about the whole process. We went back to my place for a bit and I helped him set up a wordpress blog and set up the url to it as well. We had coffee at Cafe Venetia on University.
Tuesday morning, the beautiful Steph and I walked to Izzy’s from my place for some breakfast. Izzy’s is a fantastic bagel shop, that I think is so amazing for their delicious varieties of cream cheese. We each got a bagel and split the sun-dried tomato cream cheese. I would love to do more breakfasts like this one in the future.
I had people over for my housewarming on Monday. It turned out to be a little too warm. When I turned on 2 burners and had the oven going the little amount of airflow that I could get from the apartment just wasn’t enough and it started to heat up substantially. Steve was probably the most effected by it, but everyone felt a little warm to say the least.
I ended up having Jeremy B, Adam, Andrew, Amy, Adelaide, Tina, Amit, Candice, Brian, Nick, Steve, and Steve’s wife over. It was a very large crowd for the space and I could not have fit more people in than were already there. I was somewhat surprised by the turnout since only half of them said that they would be there.
We played some cards against humanity and open faced chinese poker. The games worked really well in the space, and with the crowd that was there. Everyone liked the kitties, and played with them using the laser pointer. I think things went as well as could be expected.
I cooked a baked mac ‘n’ cheese dish, that turned out really well. The bacon was super tasty in it. I think I’ll make it again and take it over to beachhead for dinner on Thursday. Jeremy brought over a cake, Amy brought over ice cream and root beer, Brian brought over some chips and dip, and Wit brought over some really tasty beer. Nick also brought over most of the Liquor that we had built up, I’m assuming once he finds a place he’ll want me to bring over some of the nicer stuff that he likes to his housewarming.
It's an Exciting World 