Category: Fun & Games

Valentine’s Weekend

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I had a fantastic Valentine’s weekend. Yes, weekend.

It started Friday with me coming home to a clean house, flowers, and Joe baking banana bread which we took to BINGO. It was delicious! I didn’t win anything, but still had a nice time with friends.

On Saturday, Joe surprised me with reservations to P.F. Changs and tickets to see Bobby Lee (of MadTV) at the Improv Chicago in Schaumburg. I was very excited!

Dinner was rather disappointing – the chicken was overdone and the flavor was bland. I’ve had better Chinese food at the Vietnamese restaurant nearby. Shoot, even Panda Express makes better food. The atmosphere was lacking too. It was way too loud to have a conversation. Oh well, at least now we can say we’ve tried some place new even if we don’t understand why anyone would eat there a second time.

And boy was the whole area crowded! We had a hell of a time finding parking at Woodfield and once we got inside, it was a madhouse! People just everywhere, reminding me why I avoid that mall like the plague. The restaurant was hopping too which surprised me since we had early reservations (5 o’clock). People were coming in off the street looking to eat and were told there was an hour and a half wait. Not one person agreed to wait, and who can blame them? With the exception of the previous Sunday when we went out for brunch and ran into the after-church crowd, we never wait to eat.

After dinner we had a little time to kill, so we went into the Sephora and I ended up buying $77 worth of perfume. They didn’t give me any free samples though. I thought they always did that? Did I get stiffed? Do I need to send a complaint letter? Because you know I will.

We purposely took our time getting to the Improv since we hadn’t bought dinner tickets and knew we’d be sitting toward the back anyway. Luckily our waitress was a lot friendlier than last time, although this one lady trying to guide people to their seats was bitchy. We didn’t want to get crammed in with the rest of the herd, so we opted to sit in the back by the bar where it’s elevated. It gave us a great line of sight to the stage.

Both of Bobby’s opening acts were ok. I liked the second guy, Nick Thune, a lot. That is until he had the gall to use MY favorite band, The Cure, as a punchline! I could barely believe it. It was along the lines of how it’s better to go to a concert than a sporting event since there’s always a loser in sports. He said “everyone’s a winner when you go to a concert, unless it’s a Cure concert” and then proceeded to talk shit about Cure fans. Douchebag! Joe was laughing at the look on my face.

Bobby Lee is just crazy! Crazy funny, that is. I won’t ruin it by going into specifics in case anyone plans to see him, but that guy sure loves to take his clothes off. Why is it always a thong and socks? Reminds me of “24 with Bobby Lee” from MadTV. We were both a little concerned about Bobby’s stand-up act since we’ve only seen him on TV, but he was great. I only wish his set was longer than a half hour. :(

At 2 am Sunday morning I had what I guess was a panic attack? Acid reflux attack? Stroke? Seriously, I don’t know what it was, but I woke up gasping, my heart was racing, and I couldn’t stop burping. I felt so unreal, as if I was going to die. This has happened a few times before, but years ago when I was still on acid reflux medication. After I got off it and started taking probiotics, I never had that problem again. So I’m not sure what caused it, but it might have been a combination of factors – the caffeine in the latte I shared with Joe that morning, the onions in the tuna fish sandwich I had for lunch, the Chinese food, the caffeine from the regular Pepsi I ordered at the show (I’ve mostly stopped drinking pop altogether), and the rich chocolate cake I also ate at the show (2-item minimum). My left arm has felt weird ever since, though. Kinda tingly/numb, which of course freaks me out because I’m always reading that heart issues for women in particular don’t necessarily present themselves with the classic pain and crushing chest feeling. Joe thinks I just pulled a muscle or have a pinched nerve, and my work friend thinks it’s anxiety related, which is definitely possible. Google hasn’t helped me much since it could be those things or a heart thing. But since I’m pretty young, I’ve been trying to treat it like it’s not a heart thing and just give that arm a rest. Perfect excuse not to exercise after work, which of course is hurting no one but myself but whatever. I hate that Joe has dropped 20 lbs and I’ve got my doctor telling me I should get back in shape. I’m not terribly overweight, but I did gain 20 lbs since last year which for my height is concerning.

Anyway, thanks to that whole fiasco, I slept in on Sunday instead of heading out for brunch and then to an ice sculpture festival as planned. Instead we lazed around in our PJs all day and watched lots of DIY and Home & Garden. And despite being told otherwise, Joe got me a Valentine’s Day gift which he left on my jewelry box so I’d see it after I got out of the shower – chocolates, and a bracelet I had been eyeing at Target for while. I swear, he is way too good to me! I’m very lucky indeed.

I hope you all enjoyed your holiday weekend as much as I did! It was fantastic except for my stroke/anxiety thing. ;)

Windy City Rollers

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I’ve got to hand it to Joe – I mentioned to him on Thursday that I really wanted to go out and do something different this weekend and he rose to the occasion. I’m the one who makes our plans 99% of the time but he sent me an e-mail on Friday with a link to the Windy City Rollers and suggested we attend their season opener. I thought it was a great idea, so we purchased our tickets this morning at the Carson’s so we wouldn’t have to pay to print them or waste time picking them up from Will Call.

I also mentioned our plans to my friend, Jim, who I recently starting talking to again after losing touch for several years, and he said he’d be going too, so we made plans to meet up.

We arrived about a half hour before the first bout and since the tickets are general admission, had our pick of seats. I really like the UIC Pavilion because all the seats have a good view of the track. That didn’t stop us from getting stuck behind some rather annoying people, but that seems par for the course for us. I really can’t understand why people will pay to attend an event yet spend more than 50% of their time walking around, talking, or getting over-priced food and drinks. It boggles my simple frugal mind.

We saved a seat for Jim since he was running late, so we were rather lost for the first two bouts. We were also a little underwhelmed by the two teams. I wanted to see some aggression and it just wasn’t happening. We were extremely entertained by the half-time show, however, which included male cheerleaders.

The second half was when we really got into the action thanks to Jim’s explanations of what was going on and us getting better at following the action. Jim has been to these events before because his sister used to be on a team and a girl he dated is (well, technically now, was, since she’s moving out of state) on The Fury. We were going to meet her after the show, in fact, but he couldn’t find her. It was nice seeing Jim, though. We haven’t seen each other in flesh since 2000!

They started kicking people out less than a half hour after the event ended, so we parted ways. Jim was thinking about meeting up with the teams at another location and we were hungry and looking to get food in our bellies. We slept in this morning and stuffed ourselves with gyros around noon which meant we hadn’t eaten for quite awhile. We were too full before we left for the event and too cheap to buy their crappy food while there. :)

I think it’s cool that a lot of the girls from the teams come out after the event to meet with fans. And even though cameras are technically banned, no one made a big stink about people having them anyway. I left mine at home and the iPhone camera positively sucks ass, but the videos I took actually came out pretty decent. Next time I’ll just bring my P&S Canon and perhaps sit a bit closer so I can see the girls’ expressions.

We had a great time and I hope to do it again, if not this year, next year for sure. We learned it’s much cheaper to buy tickets at the box office than through Ticketbastard. It was only $21 total per ticket instead of the $52.50 we ended up paying for our two tickets. Not that I’d want to stand outside in the cold – the lines were quite long – but when the weather is warmer it won’t be such a big deal to save $10.50. That almost covers parking right there.

Jetta Maintenance & Christmas lights

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Saturday we took my Jetta in for maintenance and got stuck in the waiting area with two of the most obnoxious people on Earth. The guy didn’t know how to walk, constantly shuffling his feet while impatiently walking around, and then he screamed into his cell phone. I seriously thought he was yelling across the room to someone, not saying hello to the person he was calling. His partner wasn’t quite as bad but she was rather loud too and also felt the need to make a public phone call. What is with people? Ever hear of an indoor voice? Ever hear of actually being embarrassed to be on the phone in public? Guess not. I really don’t like talking on my phone in a public setting. I always keep the conversation quiet and short.

After my car was done we ran some errands which included a trip to the crowded post office to send a package to Joe’s parents. Luckily the line moved pretty quick and we were back home in the early afternoon.

In the evening we went back out to check out the St. Charles Christmas Lights Tour. It was … ok. We didn’t hit all the houses, but enough to get my fix. The iPhone wasn’t turning the entire addresses into a click-able link since it would cut off at the period after “St.” in the city name which made mapping to each house extremely aggravating. I should have planned ahead and bookmarked them first before going out; it would have saved a lot of frustration. I will keep that in mind for next time.

One of the houses had music synced to their lights, but it wasn’t done as well as some of the ones I’ve seen online which was too bad. My little Powershot took some pretty great photos, though. There’s a night snapshot option that works well but what’s really annoying is if you switch between the regular and scene modes, the camera resets the flash settings that were last selected in the scene mode. It defaults to the flash being on which is really annoying, particularly when you don’t notice and end up taking a picture. Doh! I don’t understand why it can’t leave all settings as they were last were, but it does the same thing for the timer settings too. So I had tons of fun trying to set up each shot with no flash and a 2-second timer every time I switched between modes (which I did to ensure I got clear shots as I hadn’t used the night snapshot before and didn’t want to use it exclusively) and also look up the next address on my phone (since the park district only provides directions to each address from the same starting point; would be nice if they could also do point to point directions too).

@ Flickr: Holiday Lights Decorating Tour

Plans

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I’m off work until December 28th! This is the single greatest moment, right now, with 9 days of workless bliss laid out in front of me.

There are a lot of things I’d like to get accomplished during my time off in addition to the basics such as watching lots of TV, reading, and playing games. So far my list looks like this:

Tomorrow:

  • Get new strut mounts and oil change for the Jetta.
  • Check out St. Charles’ holiday lights tour. This is their first year but some of the same families from the Halloween tour are participating so it should be good.
  • Buy lotto tickets for our families and mail out care packages since we’re not getting together this year with my family. My mom has been sick and isn’t up to seeing anyone. :p

During the week:

  • Finish Christmas shopping for the kids. K is done, other than a few stocking stuffers, but E is a bit tougher this year.
  • Try and think of something, anything, to buy Joe. So far he’s getting absolutely nothing, not even a lump of coal, because he’s too hard to buy for. Damn him for not being materialistic like the rest of us.
  • Put up Christmas tree and decorations because that’s right, we haven’t done that yet inside, only outside.
  • Organize software CDs. They seem to be all over the house and we probably don’t even need half of them. I want to put them all in one place so on the rare occasion we need one, it’s not an exercise in futility.
  • Submit medical receipts for reimbursement through our flex spending account. We have a good chunk of change in there that needs to be used so we don’t lose it.
  • Visit Cosley Zoo to see their holiday lights, provided it’s not freezing outside.
  • Renew my driver’s license.
  • Check out a few local restaurants we’ve been wanting to try, namely a Vietnamese bistro, a sushi place, and a steak place called Texas Roadhouse.
  • Pull out my high school yearbooks and stalk old classmates on Facebook. And I do mean stalk because it’s less annoying than actually friending these people. I’m finding reconnecting with most of them is an exercise in disappointment. I love when I send someone a private message that they never reply to but they post idiotic status updates with grammar and spelling errors all over it, making me wonder if I dreamed the fact that we actually graduated together.
  • Schedule my annual “female” exam for some day in 2010 because I don’t want to go, but it’s one of those things that must be done.
  • Put together an Evite for my birthday. I’m thinking of having a rollerskating party. Something different. Something half the invitees probably won’t show up to, but oh well, fuck it. I’m doing it anyway.
  • Check out the second run movie theater that just opened a few months ago. It doesn’t have stadium seating which has made me hesitant to go, but I’ll give it a chance for only $2 per person!
  • Read all the People magazines my friend gave me the other day. I haven’t seen her in months so the pile is quite impressive.
  • Fix my blog so I can use a different template than this one.
  • Post a best of 2009 entry for music and iPhone apps.
  • Post a 2009 year in review for this blog.

I think that’s it… for now. Let’s see how many actually get done! It will be a battle between my desire to feel productive and have fun and Joe wanting to sit inside and play Warcraft all day since that’s his idea of fun. ;)

BINGO was his NAME-O

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My employer had a fund-raising event today – we got to play BINGO! The prizes, which were various gift cards ranging from $25 up to $200, were generously donated by a few of the higher-ups in the company. Unfortunately, I did not win. Oh, I got close. Often. I swear to god, if I needed G-55, the very next number called would be G-56. If I needed I-25, they’d call I-24, and so on. Plus they’d call several numbers under the same letter but never call mine. I’m not exaggerating, this really happened. It was like some sick conspiracy! I did have fun, however, even if I think they should have made a rule that once someone won they were not eligible for any more prizes, but whatever.

I had mentioned yesterday during a conversation with a co-worker how I’ve been trying to get my hands on this super soft reversible puffer vest from Target but when they were first available they didn’t have any Mediums, only Smalls and Larges. So then a few days ago they had them in Medium and it turns out the Medium is too small and I needed a Large after all, but they’re all out of that size. So this morning she gives me a Christmas gift – the vest in size Large. I was very surprised! Now I just need to find am appropriate shirt to wear underneath.