I hadn’t planned to only eat two meals in total on Saturday and Sunday, but that’s the way things worked out.
After running some errands on Saturday morning I was hungry, but could not decide what I wanted to eat. All I knew was that I did not want the temptation of alcohol since I had consumed plenty the night before at Cypress Street Pint & Plate with some ill effects. Readers of this space might correctly guess what happened next… I found myself at a Chinese buffet. Hell, it was almost Chinese New Year, I had to eat Chinese! I was “good” and limited myself to too much food, as opposed to ridiculously too much food.
Yesterday I knew that I was meeting a bunch of friends for dim sum at Oriental Pearl. As to be expected the place was packed with people celebrating the new year and I stuffed my gullet with delicious food never to be found on any buffet that I can find in this city. While I was feeling stuffed at first, as you do after eating Chinese food, surprisedly I never was hungry again the rest of the day or night.
ITP Flickr Pic
“Chinese New Year’s Brunch At Oriental Pearl” (Chamblee, GA)
In the distance you can see the dragons entering the building to perform their ceremony.
Play It Again
Saturday night’s play was far more up my alley than was Thursday night’s.
On Saturday night I returned to Theatrical Outfit, this time for their performance of “Silent Sky”. The play, based on fact, is about a group of women who worked for a Harvard astronomy professor and were responsible for some of the theories used to classify stars and help calculate the distance of other galaxies. While it sounds nerdy, and honestly the underlying science is, the play was well performed and done so at a level that anyone with at least a high school graduation could understand. It’s been held over until March 8th, so if you want to get your inner nerd on and support Atlanta’s theatrical scene I highly suggest seeing “Silent Sky”. If you’d like to find out more information about the play I found this exhaustive Silent Sky Tumblr site. The evening would have been near-perfect if the young woman two seats from me didn’t repeatedly talk to her man during the play; even a low-volume sentence during a play irritates me. Besides, what could be so fucking important that it cannot wait until either intermission or the play’s end?
Works In Progress
While I struggle to correct some health problems, reducing alcohol consumption might be a great first step, I have added two new irons in my hypothetical project fire. A third iron, “Play 60” (the title of which I’ve stolen from the NFL) an attempt to get a hour’s worth of exercise every day, is near the fire but not yet in.
First, you know of my ongoing efforts to learn German. I’m still working on this, not as hard a I should perhaps, and have wondered if buying early-reader children’s books and translating them from English to German would be beneficial to me. The language in these books is generally uncomplicated, exactly like the German that I can currently understand, and performing translations may help cement vocabulary words in my conscience. It certainly couldn’t hurt, right? I stopped at a couple of Goodwills over the weekend and found their lack of organization frustrating, but their pricing of these books at $0.77 inviting. No book purchases have been made yet.
One purchase I did make over the weekend was a Polar H7 Heart Rate Monitor from REI. There are two reasons for making this purchase. First, the obvious one that I want to start exercising again so it may be beneficial to monitor my heart rate while doing so. Second, the H7 responds to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and I am learning about this technology for a little iOS app that I’m contemplating. I was so into buying the H7 yesterday after eating dim sum that I skipped the Chinese New Year fireworks celebration, stopped at REI, and then went straight home, completely forgetting about all of the other errands that I had planned to run yesterday.
How went your weekend?
Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]
A big shout out to Barb and Allan for their help on Saturday. We started the weekend off right with some TC and the added bonus of TJ and Mary. Allan joined the party Saturday morning after a long night tending to sick airport employees. We loaded all but the most essential furniture into PackRat #2, along with boxes of stuff.
Sunday there was more packing and some toilet repair (!!) which has yet to be successful. A call to the plumber might be in order. Ugh.
And did I misread- you are translating English childrens books into to German, or the other way round? I was going to be amazed if Goodwill had German childrens books.
-FP
English children’s books to German. I *should* be able to do this by now for the early-reader books.
I did enough physical labor Saturday to hold me over for a while, after getting home from Moreland we helped TJ & Mary finish filling up their dumpster. It is now FULL, and the house has no bathrooms or kitchen. Ended up at Baby Tommy’s for some pizza after all that, so the middle of the afternoon meal was almost enough for the night. But, I got a wild idea to try to make some home made pretzels (saw an Alton Brown recipe recently). They came out pretty good, but some cheese dipping sauce would have made them even better (Allan had his mustard, but that doens’t work for me)
Sunday morning we did some grocery shopping, Allan is off to Forsyth, GA for a week of class again & needed provisions for a week away. Made a big crockpot full of chili for dinner, and headed to the Black Sheep hash. After talking to the hares (who reccy’d by google earth), I determined that the trail was destin to be a clusterf*ck, and decided to bimbo. I was right, the trail trial went on forever with stories of trying to find trail. Finally got home about 7pm.
Happy Year of the Sheep! I’m not sure how one is supposed to celebrate that, but I’m thinking I might need to mow down on a gyro here soon. Is there a difference between a lamb and a sheep? Is lamb just baby sheep? I reckon Barb did the right celebration: Black Sheep! (was there anything there about the Chinese New Year?)
Weekend started off rough…didn’t feel so hot all day Saturday and Sunday morning (laid around clearing out the DVR). But managed to climb out of my funk last eve to go to a trivia finale where our team won 2nd place ($1000!). So my wallet’s $200 heavier this morning and that’s not a sucky way to start out the week at all. 😀
Kudos to you, Barb. Had I realized that it was a Black Sheep Sunday and that it is the year of the Sheep I might have made an appearance. 😉
Woo Hoo Stacy! That’s quite the nice payday for an evening out. I remember when I was smart enough to participate in trivia…
well – there was some talk in trail trial about Chinese New Year & sheep, but really, it was just to prolong the ice time. It was cold & damp out there.
There’s always the next trail in 2 weeks.
And – it looks like Claire has talked me into haring with her on July 12th, she is turning 50 in July too, so she wants to have a theme – 50 shades of red. At least we have months to figure this out.
2nd place was $1000?? Holy crap, that’s almost makes drinking and playing trivia profitable… almost.
Back when we (were younger and) played trivia regularly, a few of us went to Manuels’ on a Sunday evening for trivia. We quickly realized we weren’t ready to come up to “the show” and went back to our minor league home.
Congratulations on your success.
This weekend was spent sleeping on an aircraft carrier with 50 people stacked 3 high in bunks. 25 of these people were between the ages of 6 and 10. I’m sure I don’t need to say how it went. I was asleep on the couch by 8:15 last night.
The USS Yorktown is a really cool ship with a lot of history, touring the ship was really fun when I wasn’t trying to corral a bunch of 6 year olds. The kids did have fun and hopefully learned a thing or 2 which is the point of the trip.
Paulie, maybe you can find some middle or high school German class text books to help out. Something like this http://www.fluentu.com/german/blog/learn-best-german-textbooks/
Thanks everyone! This was the “Top 50” teams invite and I think 38 or 39 teams ended up showing, so not too shabby. We have the “Top 25” teams invite in two weeks. Fingers crossed we do well there too.
Paulie, if you want to come join us this Thursday, Yassir and I are planning to play at Midtown Tavern: it starts at 8:30pm. Actually that goes for anyone who might want to! It’s not a money-winning game, just a regular bar-tab winning one, but it’s still fun. Added bonus: Midtown Tavern went smoke-free last year so no coming out at the end of the night smelling nasty anymore.
I’ll look into that Bob. Thanks. I’m thinking the children’s books might be good since the sentence structure is so basic.
Stacy, odds are good that you will see me on Thursday night. I don’t need the lure of real cash prizes to hang out with you. 🙂
If I can get myself to leave Cobb county Thursday night, maybe I will venture out. You just never know……….
Yay! To both of you! I’ll remind y’all when it gets closer.
And trust me, I totally understand that, Barb. 🙂 I’m the same way after I get home each night…hard to head back out anywhere far, especially when it’s dark out. But thankfully we’re only two weeks away from DST! That will help a lot.