Playing catch-up and saying "waaaaaasabi!"

Argh!
Haven't had time to write about the rest of my (Pat)Labor Day escapades!
I'm just gonna have to run through it all quickly then.

Saturday Sep 4th: 2-hour bus ride to the Estrogen Zone!
(aka "Zrath-Smiley versus Los Angeles Public Transit, round 1, fight!")
Aside from mailing off a bunch of eBay auctions, I had nothing planned for Saturday.
I didn't want to spend all day in The Oven, so I decided to attend the "The Estrogen Zone" monthly event
at the LASFS Club House. (The LASFS is one of the world's oldest science fiction club and includes a lot
of sci-fi authors, both known and unknown, on its roster, along with fans and other interested parties).
The Estrogen Zone is organized by Chick Flicks (Ladies Auxiliary Sewing and Firearms Society).
They pick a theme and shows movies related to the theme. They also play a lot of mah-jong.
The LASFS is in North Hollywood, I'm in Culver City (which sounds more and more like a western town
name to me every day. "Hey Billy, I gotta drive 'em cattles all the way to Culver City. YeeHAH!!!").
By car, it's about 30-45 minutes. I don't have a car. So I had to ride 3 buses to get there.
I mailed all my stuff at 3:30pm, grabbed Bus #1 at 4pm, and eventually reached my destination at 6pm.
The theme was baseball! So I watched most of "Major League" ("holy '80s fashion nightmare, Batman!").
Then everyone took a dinner break and we all went en masse to a nearby Olive Garden.
I was a bit nervous because, a) I'd never been to a Olive Garden before and
b) somebody on my friends' list went recently and was violently ill,
c) which prompted discussions about the food and how it's all pre-cooked off-site and microwaved on-site.
Bleargh...
I decided to give it a chance anyway. I'm stupid like that.
We waited an hour for a table. Darrell had registered us as "Donner", and sure enough,
our party number kept shrinking because some people had to leave to start the long drive home,
or couldn't take the wait. So we went from "Donner, party of 13", to "Donner, party of 12",
to "Donner, party of 11". And we stayed at 11.
We eventually got a seat and waited some more to get our order taken, then waited for the food,
then waited for the refill on food, and the refill on drinks. Wait, wait, wait.
Granted, the place was packed. Oh yeah, we all got the "endless pasta bowl" thingy,
that was the main reason Olive Garden was picked, so that's why we got refills on food.
I must say that the "four cheese marinara" sauce was pretty darned good. There was so much cheese in it,
you couldn't even tell it was a marinara anymore. Overall, it was okay.
But when it comes to group-dining with Italian food, Buca Di Beppo is THE PLACE to go!

After the dinner ordeal, we went back to the club house and watched "Fields Of Dream".
After that, everyone went home. I got a ride home from my good friend Tadao, aka "Mr. Shakehandsman" (among other things).
The end.



Sunday Sep 5th: Swelter at the computer!
Well, I was behind on posting eBay auctions, so I decided to focus on that.
It was hot outside and even hotter in the computer room. Eurgh...
So that was most of the day right there.
(holds up a little sign that says: "Exciting, isn't it?")
Okay, next!!



Monday Sep 6th: Apples To Apples and killer turkeys!
(aka "My god! This game has worst fog than Hi-Octane!!")
So it's Labor Day and I heard there was a BBQ at Rick And Tess's place.
I enlisted my buddy Warren to head down there and check it out. He brought his girlfriend Amber with him.
We get there and discover that it's actually the usual Monday Gaming session, with added BBQ action.
So the turn-out is much lower than I expected. I feel kinda bad, because I thought this would be a regular party.
Everything turns out okay though, because Warren is a gamer, so he gets involved in a little
Magic: The Quickening action. And Tess provides us with a PSOne to play around with, so I try out
the South Park game, the one with all the killer turkeys and the awful draw-in/fog effect.
Later, we all play an amusing card game called "Apples To Apples".
We had a whole lot of fun and stayed pretty late.



And voila! That was Labor Day weekend. Wooh!

Next, I must tackle what happened last weekend.

Music is life

We all have iTunes at work, so we can share each other's library.
This is what's in mine:

3900 songs - 15 days - 20.15 GB

There are 3900 tracks in my iTunes.
It would take 15 days to listen to all of them once.
They take up 20.15 gigs of hard drive space.
99% of these are from CDs I own.

I have very little overlap with my colleagues.
A Daft Punk here, a Prodigy there, maybe a Coldplay over there.
That's about it.

I am a funky machine.