December scramble So I survived another birthday... For the scant couple of hours notice I gave people, It turned out well... if I didn't manage to conatct you, and you're a friend, please don't take it personally, I'm just a flake. I've already remembered a handful of people I forgot to tell. As a pub warm-up, we started with a trip to "Freight", which is our office's "Ally McBeal" bar (meaning that it's the uncharacteristically trendy bar that happens to be in the building our office is in, and we go there a lot, and make sassy comments about the day's events. We don't actually watch Ally McBeal there.)

Freight is, as far as I know, the only bar in Chelsea ("the meat packing district") that you have to actually go through a butcher shop, past dead animals on hooks to enter (at least to enter from our office building). It makes it fun to explain to newcomers how to find it:

"yes... you're in the building. See the butcher shop? Yes, the meat, yes. Go past the meat.... No, not on down the hall... ENTER THE BUTCHER SHOP and proceed past the meat. NO, it's not a meat bar. YES, THAT DOOR. It's not the back room, I swear... they're not butchering anything back here... Do you hear the bar-music? Your cellphones breaking up... YES, PAST THE MEAT."

After an hour or so of Friday Happy Hour there (and some tequila), we continued on to the Village Idiot. We actually managed to get a corner of the bar, and arrived about 15 minutes before a shift change, so we had the best of both worlds, totally wasted bartendresses to start out, who joined us in a couple of rounds of cheap shots, but after we'd gotten "the show", they switched to the friday night A-list bartenders who'd not yet gotten smashed, and therefore were easier to transact beer purchases with, and were less likely to be dancing on the bar, kicking over our PBR's and the peanut basket.

Finally, we headed to Avenue A for Sushi, which I vaguely remember as being good, and then home to bed, which I don't remember at all.

Since then, I've been tuning and polishing my new Sun workstation in the office, and making travel plans for the next few weeks/months.

Maggie's gotta go to Seattle on Thursday morning for a couple of days... during her away-time, I'm gonna help Karen fix her Blog up, in exchange for gourmet Pork Chops.

In the week or two after Maggie gets back, I'll be having holiday dinners/beers with as many of my friends as I can schedule with... Then, I take off for Iowa on the 23rd, coming back the 26th. That's the shortest holiday trip I've made in many years, but I've got a lot of work to do this month (according to plan, we'll see if it really happens)...

Then, I'm going to try to get to Florida on or about New Year's day, to meet up with Kirk, Vawd, and a couple of other Iowans for the Orange Bowl...

Finally, I spoke with my Brazilian pal Alex on ICQ the other day, and he thinks we should go whale-watching in South America this Jan/Feb... I think I'll be sleeping most of those months, but maybe I can do some of it on the beach. I need to rack up some miles to keep my platinum membership with the airline... Posted by ryan at December 08, 2002 06:50 PM