Not The Weekend I Expected

Traffic on Friday afternoon was not terrible, but that didn’t stop me from having a few pints with dinner on a return visit to Brass Tap Beer Bar. I was solo on this visit and ate a surprisingly enjoyable plate of chicken nachos for dinner. I’m sure that the 50% off price tag for happy hour helped me enjoy the plate of food, whose less-than-foodie components of deli-sliced chicken and obvious liquid cheese from a can surprised my eyes upon its arrival.

Saturday’s weather confused and stifled me. I was considering on cranking up the lawn mower and running it over the weeds that have sprung from nowhere over the past week, but the rain that dropped early in the day thwarted that plan. The rain also convinced me not to walk up to the village for lunch, so I concocted a meal of Rice-a-Roni and frozen shrimp, which had suffered a bit of freezer burn, instead for lunch.

I was going to wait until April 1st (which is shockingly this Friday!) to declare my challenge to eat more food out of my pantry and freezer, not replenishing either until I’ve gone through everything in both. I’ll allow myself to buy perishables and proteins as I do this, but there shan’t be another purchase of canned beans, boxed pasta, etc. until this challenge has been completed.

As I do many Saturday nights these days I chose to stay home alone. In order to entertain myself I baked a loaf of bread in the bread machine and upon its completion ate some bread and canned chili for dinner. While all of the baking was going on I watched a German movie called The Lives Of Others, which thankfully had English subtitles. It’s amazing, scary, and discouraging to realize just how much German I still have to learn.

Perhaps the highlight of my Saturday was the emergence of the zit on my nostril that had been causing me grief all week. It wasn’t so much about the vanity of my nose, Jebus knows that I no longer have a need to be vain especially if all I do on Saturday nights is stay home alone, but it was relieving to feel as if this nonsense was finally going to clear up.

Thanks to the rain that was predicted for yesterday both of the potential Easter activities — the Easter bike ride / picnic, and the scavenger hunt — fell through. The scavenger hunt has been rescheduled in a few weeks, but on that day I shall be riding the final day of the BRAG Spring Tune Up.

Fortunately for me on Saturday night I received a text from ITP-Reader Barb letting me know that she was having people over to her house for brunch, so a plan from the Easter bike rides emerged. Not knowing what to bring I was given epiphany when I saw a tweet from Sublime Doughnuts on Sunday morning saying that they were open. At the appointed time I packed a bottle of Prosecco, stopped at Sublime and purchased a dozen donuts, and made a final pitstop at Kroger for orange juice, on my drive to Marietta. It was a fun afternoon sitting around, eating copious amounts of food, and shooting the shit.

While at Barb’s I got a phone call from my boss inviting me to join him and a couple of his aquarium volunteer friends at Benchwarmers, and I did, and it was good, and there was much rejoicing.

My long day caught up with me as I passed out fairly early last night. (in the spirit of full disclosure I am writing this blog at 1:00am because I have been wide awake for about two hours)

In my insomniac state I have signed up for the Tony Serrano Century Ride on April 9th. Thankfully I was not delirious enough to believe that I should ride the entire century, so I chose the 62-mile option.

Speaking Of Springing Up Out Of Nowhere
When I returned home on Friday night I found a bowling ball on the edge of my front lawn. From the condition the ball was in I gathered that someone ditched the sphere from a moving vehicle. Not feeling very neighborly I simply rolled the ball into the gutter (get it? oh, how I make myself laugh!) and left it there. I intended to fetch the ball on Saturday night but since I never left the house I altered my plan to get it on Sunday. And wouldn’t you know that on Sunday the ball was gone! My neighborhood is so full of surprises…

Speaking Of Resurrection
On Saturday I was certain that my Jawbone JAMBOX bluetooth speaker had died after 3.5 years of near-daily use. When I plugged it in on Saturday, a day when it once again “jammed” itself off the nightstand and fell onto the floor, nothing happened. I had fallen asleep listening to music, but I was fairly certain that this speaker had an auto-shutoff feature so it shouldn’t have run its battery down to being completely depleted. As a last-ditch effort I plugged it overnight and was pleased to see that it had resurrected itself on Sunday! How appropriate, right?

Speaking Of Completed Challenges
Sadly it’s become quite the rarity for me to declare victory with a project I mention in this space. Sometime in 2014/2015 I bought a box of one thousand English-German flash cards to use for my studying. At some point last year, probably last Spring, I mentioned my desire to transcribe all of these cards into a file that I can use for my yet-to-be-started Flash Cards iOS app. Last night I typed in card #1000, thus completing the first stage of my project. My new goal is to code the Flash Cards app using Apple’s new(ish) programming language Swift in order for me to start learning it for future employment.

I hope that you had as interesting of a weekend as I did.

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]