• Do you know what’s better than spending a beautifully warm and sunny Friday and Saturday in class? Pretty much anything. OK, it wasn’t that bad, but I miss my weekends.
• On the bright side, I did get to eat in a college dining hall for the first time in 11 years. I sort of forgot what it’s like to eat in one. The quality of the food is pretty much what I expected (not great, not bad), but it’s the sheer volume that I forgot about. For $5, I could have eaten a panini, a pizza, a hamburger and fries, tacos, a turkey sandwich, a salad, 4 bowls of cereal, a make-your-own stir-fry, as many soft-serve ice cream cones as I wanted, and four bunches of bananas. The all-you-can-eat concept is not something that I’ve encountered a whole lot lately, I decided to take advantage of it and stuffed two bananas in my bag for later in the day. Of course, both got smooshed in the bottom of my bag and got banana all over everything. That’ll learn me.
• A Saturday night of Chinese Food, beers, and Wii was pretty much the perfect ending to a very long week. I must admit, I never envisioned being in my 30’s playing video games at home on a Saturday night. With my wife.
• Lawn maintainance has begun for the year. I didn’t have time until yesterday, but I finally raked up all of the dead junk, mowed the crazy-long patches in front, seeded, and fertilized. I’m hoping that the week of rain will get things off to a good start. I’ll need to be better about the deep watering this year as I sort of let it slide last year resulting in weeds taking over a good chunk of the lawn. Never again!
• I also took the opportunity to clean out my grill. And by clean, I mean hack away at the layers and layers of charred grease and fat that was caked into every nook and cranny in the grill. You know you’ve got problems when the entire inside of the grill lights on fire anytime you leave it on high with the cover closed for five minutes. I’m sure my neighborhood will appreciate me not filling the street with black smoke.
• The Lovely Tess’s favorite foods of the week: miso-glazed salmon and stir-fried broccoli with garlic. Until the third consecutive day of it when she took a handful of the broccoli and unceremoniously dumped it on the ground. The girl knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to let you know. Oh we’re going to have our hands full.
• Seriously, we’re going to compost this year. I started doing it last year and quickly lost steam. This year, I’m going to be better about it. I swear.
• So I’ve been routinely having late-night conference calls multiple times a week for school stuff. As the Lovely Suse needs to get her beauty sleep, she’ll go to bed while I’m still busy talking about school nonsense. Of course being the considerate husband that I am, I make great efforts not to wake her up when I finally go to bed. Last week I failed miserably at that. At around 11:30 on Wednesday night, with the house completely dark, I made an ill-fated attempt at returning the phone to the charger on her nightstand. It being completely pitch-black, I failed to notice the full glass of water perched atop a stack of books on the nightstand. Of course I knocked the glass over dumping the entire contents all over the table and the floor. Oh, but it gets worse. The glass happened to knock into the glass globe-like lamp that the Lovely Suse loves oh-so-much. Of course, the thing cracked and broke into multiple pieces, waking her out of a dead sleep. You know the look that a wife can give a husband when they’ve done something really stupid? Multiply that by about 1000 and you know what I experienced for about two full days. Yes, I’m an idiot. That’s been well-established by now.

• For anyone who was grossed out by last week’s post, sorry. It had to be done. Life is full of poop.
• Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!. The greatest wife of all time surprised the hell out of me and got me a Wii for my birthday. Granted, she seems to love it as much as I do (and has more time to play it than I do), but what a great gift. I haven’t owned a video game console since the original Nintendo (which pretty much defined my life from 5th grade to 8th grade), and I’ve never been much into the modern video games. I get bored easily and don’t have the patience or the time to devote to playing. But the wii changes things completely. You’ve seen how it works, and it’s every bit as fun as it looks. The interface is ingenius, and the game play is super-intuitive and fun. We’re completely hooked. We’ve only played the included sports games, but I’m looking forward to seeing how games stack up. I see Guitar Hero in my future…
• George and the Lovely Tess got me my very own Sigg Bottle. It’s light, it’s sleek, it’s sturdy, it can be used as a weapon if necessary, oh, and it holds water too. In light of the growing concerns over BPA, this bottle hopefully won’t kill me.
• The Lovely Suse and the Lovely Tess both get the day off today for Patriot’s Day. I’m so jealous. I am, however, not jealous of all the people running the marathon today. Been there, done that. And my body has no interest in ever doing that again. I’m pretty sure that if someday I decided to run another marathon, my legs would revolt and intentionally try to injure themselves to prevent me from running ever again. Let’s just say that they didn’t really enjoy the first marathon experience so much.
• Our main internet router died yesterday. You don’t realize how much you depend on the internet until you’re completely cut off from it. My email, calendar, phone numbers, and every piece of information that I seem to need is online. I started walking around the house searching for an open wireless network in the neighborhood, but amazingly, everyone had their security enabled. That’s just not right.
• My favorite pair of jeans is about to die. I give them about 4 hours before giant holes start appearing. I’ll be very sad, but I guess I can’t complain. I’ve worn them probably 5 days a week for about a year and a half. I can only ask so much from an item of clothing, right? In the meantime, there are a bunch of those iron-on patches in the inside to try to beef up the high-stress areas. It’s sort of pathetic.
• I’ve got to come clean about something: I have those little fun packs of peanut M&M’s in my desk at work. I’ve gotten into the habit of eating one a day. Seriously, there are only like 5 M&M’s in each pack, but it’s still sort of funny that I now NEED to have those in there. In fact, it’s 9:30am and I just ate an M&M.

So, today is my birthday. I’m at the age where I literally have to do the math to figure out how old I am. Seriously. 31, 32, 33? Does it really matter at this point? I suppose I’ll be excited to turn 33 because that’s Larry Bird’s number, and everyone knows that whenever I see one of those police traffic signs that tells you how fast you’re going I either speed up or slow down so that it will read “33″ and then I yell “Larry! Lary! Larry!” (the lovely Suse always enjoys that one). Otherwise, it’s a pretty uneventful day, and I’m ok with that. After the last week that I’ve had, the less excitement the better. We will skip the top ten this week in order to relate the awfulness of last week. There is much comedy in the sheer terribleness that was last week.

So the week starts off with a call from daycare saying that the Lovely Tess is sick. Poor Lovely Tess. So I pick her up and bring her home and she has a miserable time of it with a nasty stomach bug. The Lovlely Suse stays home with her Tuesday, and I take Wednesday duty. Early on Wednesday, I know that something is not feeling right. I had caught the bug earlier in the winter, so I knew what it felt like. And then, it was on. Four straight days of horror. I’ll spare you the really gory details, so let’s use some euphemisms. Let’s say I spent last week playing golf. A lot of golf. Most of those four days, I was playing more than 18 holes a day. Some days, almost 36. At some points, I was playing a hole every five minutes or so. And let’s just say that those holes had a whole lot of water hazards. Yeah. So take those facts, and add in the fact that while this was going on, I was trying to also take care of an equally sick 10-month old. Except she split her time between soiling every piece of clothing that she owned, every sheet and towel in the house, the poor dog, and taking every book off every shelf that we own. All the while I was writhing in pain on the floor.

By Thursday, the Lovely Tess was on the mend and by Friday, she was back at school. My sickness lasted through Saturday, however. This is a key point, because Saturday night would be our annual Pete’s birthday visit to Craigie Street Bistrot, our favorite restaurant around. We tossed around the idea of cancelling, but due to our schedules, we knew that it would be a long time before we would be able to find another time to go. I started feeling slightly better over the course of the day, I we would make a go of it. An hour before we left, my stomach sounded like a couple of dogs attacking one another, and I was experiencing what I can only assume were labor pains (piercing, long, unable to speak, felt like some one was taking my guts and twisting them into a knot), but miraculously, they went away just a few minutes before we left. Somehow, I had willed my body into allowing me this glorious meal. Hooray! Our karma was confirmed when for the second year in a row, we snagged one of the precious four parking spaces directly in front of the restaurant. It was time to finally indulge a bit.

Now here’s where my judgement may have been a little off. With the condition I was in, I hadn’t really eaten much of anything since Wednesday. In fact, I can’t remember ever in my life eating so little over a span of time that long. I managed to get down a couple of slices of dry toast, a couple of slices of pizza (also not the best choice, but I was desperate), and that was about it. I forgot about the little fact that your stomach tends to shrink after that. So what’s the best way of dealing with a very sensitive and very shrunken stomach? Obviously a meal consisting of a nice slab of a chicken/quail/goose liver terrine and toasts, marinated sardines, pork three ways (braised belly, of course, sausage, and confit suckling pig with the crispiest candy-like cracking imaginable), the largest and meatiest scallops I’ve ever seen, clams, mussels, and a bottle of wine. Smart, right? It was midway through our entrees that I knew that I had made a big mistake. So big that I couldn’t even finish my piece of suckling pig (although I did eat the piece of crackling that was left). Dessert was not an option . Of course, we’re then presented with complimentary ancho chili and cardamom infused hot chocolate and little madelines, which was obviously just a cruel joke. It was basically a cup of pure melted goodness, and I really couldn’t insult the chef, could I? I knew I always already going to pay for it, so I might as well finish it off in style.

The drive home was uncomfortable to say the least. I got home, took off my pants, and just laid down in bed, moaning in pain. You know that feeling of being “bad full”? The just completely uncomfortable, sweating, miserable, why the hell did I eat that much feeling? Multiply that by about 1000. The growling dogs returned to my stomach, and I had a miserable night. Was it worth it? Definitely. Amazingly, I felt completely fine the next day. It was a miracle! I had been healed by pork! Oh well, let’s hope that the start of my 32nd year is a lot nicer than the end of my 31st.

• When I as first told that this program would require about 20 hours of work a week, I tried to figure out where I would possibly find that many free hours. Apparently, I’ve found them every night of the week, during my lunch hour, and all weekend long. Thank god the Lovely Suse has hobbies. My Saturday consisted of meeting with my group for six hours in the morning and then spending another three plus hours at night trying to finish an assignment that needed to be turned in by 11:59:59pm. I believe we finally submitted it around 11:45pm. Not to cut it close or anything. On the bright side, I was immensely impressed with Skype’s conference call and file sharing capabilities. It worked like a charm.
• Here’s an article that better articulates why I love the British Gordon Ramsay and I hate the American one.
• Shangri-La’s chef’s special crispy tea smoked duck has always been a favorite of ours, but it’s also been given the thumbs-up from the Lovely Tess (and obviously George). George literally starts bouncing off the walls as soon as it comes in the house, and after the Lovely Tess’s first bite, she started pulling other things out of her mouth in order to shove more duck in it. Followed immediately by her approving “Yum yum yum yum.”
• The idea of doing Spring yard cleanup is pretty much the last thing I want to think about right now. But there are already tulips up and our chives and oregano are already starting to push through the ground. I guess it’s time to start working on year two of the great organic lawn care experiment. Oh, and there’s a gigantic dead, broken treetop hanging precariously over our garage right now. It’s supposed to be removed early this week, so hopefully no damage will be done.
• Stupid. Fricking. Broken. Computer. I hate my PC. Once again, it died last week. The new motherboard that I had put in had been giving me nothing but problems since day 1, so I finally pulled it out, put my own one back in, and decided to use the crappy but so far working on-board video. It’s back up and running, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed. Don’t be surprised to see its various parts up on Ebay sometime soon.
• It’s fantasy baseball season again, and much like last year, I plan on competing without making a single transaction all year. The first year, I won. Last year, I came in dead last. Currently, I’m in third place and falling. Oh well.
• Sorry I didn’t get this posted yesterday. I unexpectedly had to pick up a sick Lovely Tess at school. It hasn’t been a fun 24 hours. Let’s just say that our house smelled like a Chinatown fish market dumpster.