I really enjoyed the movie. It was a stupid movie, with tons of cliches, and a very predictable plot. It also made fun of itself the entire time. I highly recommend seeing it in a theater.
We took Valentines weekend in Las Vegas with a lot of friends. This was originally planned as just a friends trip, but it ended up turning into a bachelor/bachelorette party.
The flight there was delayed by 4.5 hours. This was due to the fasten seatbelt sign not working, which they didn’t fix. Instead they just said, “we’re going flying anyway, and you just can’t get up during the flight.” We made it there just barely in time to go to the spa. Steph was a little late to her massage, but not too bad. We didn’t have time beforehand to check in, so we did that after and went to dinner after a short nap.
Dinner was at Bar Masa and the food was pretty good, but no dish really stood out as fantastic. It was a pretty massive group of close to 30 people, and we all had a good bit of sake. The night progressed up to the suite, where four guys dressed as teenage mutant ninja turtles came up, and we played a lot of codenames. Steph was sleepy since we had to get up early so she left around 1am, and I stayed until about 3am since I had slept on the flight.
The next day we went to brunch at Bardot, where Steph got the largest French toast I’ve ever seen.
We then went up to George’s room and played some more Codenames with Tom and Irene. I really enjoyed spending time with them, and will have to have them over some time. We then went to a nice dinner at Milo, followed by some gambling at Ellis Island. They were giving out $10 in free slots play, which was interesting. It took a while for everyone to figure it out, but they did. Debby was the one who enjoyed it the most by far, as you can see in the poorly shot video below (Sorry for portrait).
After a 4.5 hour delay on the way in it was annoying to have a 4.5 hour delay on the way out, which included a long wait on the runway because one of the AC units was broken, but they decided “we’re going to fly anyway.” Not sure how I’m feeling about Jet Blue after this trip.
I played a game I hadn’t before at games night with Brian, Tina, and Adam. Bios was an interesting game, with many different facets. The parts we were in control of were really fun, but the random events could completely decimate a player. There were points when a winning player would be taken completely off the board by an event. This made it very frustrating to play. The building up of the species was a lot of fun, and it worked really really well.
Steph and I joined George, Lindsay, Adam, Debby, and Andrew at Kevin’s Parents’ house. It was a really amazing dinner with some tasty dumplings. By some dumplings I mean hundreds of dumplings. Steph, Lindsay, and Kevin bet against me in the ‘how many dumplings will Andrew eat; contest. I took the low end at 1-17, with Andrew coming in at 10.5. We also got a lot of the red envelopes for Kevin and stuffed them with all sorts of money, and a lot of mtg cards. It was hilarious to see him walking up the stairs getting red envelopes rained on him. The video is pretty bad but it gets the point across:
After dinner we went to see Kung Fu Panda 3 as a group, and it was entertaining. I’d have to say it was better than I’d expected and pretty good for the third in a series.
Steph, Kevin, Lindsay, and I went to Manresa for a nice dinner. It was amazingly delicious. We took Kevin and Lindsay as a thank you for Lindsay showing us around India. Here are the courses that Steph had, mine were a bit different since Steph was eating the vegetarian option.
Saturday was a great night, besides the head wound. We had a nice group of people join us at Redwood Coast Cidery in San Carlos. Adam, Tina, Amit, Riley, and Rong were there. The cidery was lively, and we got to have some good conversations with the bartenders/brewers. We then went back to beachhead where we played a bit of codenames. I did really badly since I wasn’t sober, and then on the way out I banged my head on the security system that was sticking off the wall a bit. It turned out fine, and now I know that the cider is a bit stronger than one would expect.
Rocket had a happy hour on Friday and we went to a neat brewery called Black Hammer Brewery. It was really good beer, and really good food. Bo was able to join me and we got to chat a good bit. There were a few stragglers, myself among them. We chatted, had a few more beers, then things at the brewery shifted to the burner crowd and I decided to try to catch the next train. I missed it but caught the one an hour later, and got some work done in the meantime.
This book was very light, and the story itself wasn’t that involved. The major concept of the book ‘the practice effect’ was fun to think about.
Stephanie had some really good points in the discussion, mainly that any civilization that has such a strong value of man-hours would have incredibly large families. They would also have spread out and settled pretty much all the land in order to have the most number of people possible.
I thought that there wasn’t nearly enough sharing and offering of services to keep tools practiced.
The discussion was really great and the food was taken pretty well (it disappeared pretty quickly). I made some of the Vegetable Kofta, which was a lot more involved from the start than I was expecting. The prep that the teaching chef had done was a good deal of the time that was needed, even if it wasn’t the skill part of the cooking.
I’m really enjoying this series. It’s reading level and story complexity is clearly for a much younger group, but I still really like it. The book has an amazing mix of humor, magic, and light science. The political environment, and the people in charge being foiled over and over is written so well.
It's an Exciting World 