Tidbits and Miscellany - and a picture of Mexico!

Well, Mom didn't get her film to Costco yet which is a good thing as it turns out because she had forgotten that I asked her to get CDs. Then she made a little sidebitch about having to go with Kodak which is more expensive – blah blah blah. You'd think the woman has no money the way she scrapes pennies, but when you know that she works 70 hours a week and does NOTHING otherwise (except go on my Mexican vacation), you know she has money socked away. She'll probably die with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank.

Dammit! As most of you know I have season tickets to the DSO (Detroit Symphony Orchestra). One of the highlights to the season for me was going to be Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Although I love other classical pieces more, it was my first true classical love. The problem? Yeah, YS's graduation is the next morning at 9:30 a.m. in fucking Mount Pleasant, MI. I am NOT PLEASED! I was really really really looking forward to hearing the 9th live once again. FUCK!

I'm wondering if I need to give my Highlander: The Series DVDs a break. I had one weird-ass dream last night and all I know is that it had something to do with Immortals. I'm not even halfway through Season 4! And every time I watch another episode, I think to myself how much I love that show.

My friend HRH just sent me this article. If you click on the picture to the right, you'll see me standing there with Mom decked out in my all my Champ Car glory. Unfortunately, you can only see my back. HINT: We're the non-Mexicans in the picture (i.e., look for the light-haired woman in the grey T-shirt and jeans. That's Mom.).

I'm really annoyed with myself right now. I forgot my book!!! Which meant I had to talk to people in the coffee room while I heated up my leftover pizza and it means that when I go straight to the gym after work that I won't have anything to read. SHIT! I hope that I get a TV in front of ESPN and not the bloody General Hospital TV.

Yesterday was a day off, ostensibly for Veterans Day, but everybody here calls it, "Hunting Day." Today, for those of you who are lucky enough not to know, is the first day of Firearms Hunting Season. The union bargained for Veterans Day off, but it's never on Veterans Day, it's always the Friday or Monday closest to November 15, so that the killers of deer have enough time to get up north and settled into their blinds and drink enough beer to fire off a shot at something that just might possibly be a deer – or at least isn't another drunken hunter. I don't know about you, but the mixture of alcohol and guns just seems singularly foolhardy.

Since returning from Mexico last Tuesday evening I have started and completed four scarves. The fifth is actually damn near done. Bind off and then weave in the ends and five scarves will officially be done. That leaves me with three more to do before mailing them off to Mexico. I want them done before Thanksgiving!

Saturday night I went to my aunt and uncle's for dinner. We had been trying to schedule a dinner for some months as I have bottles of red wine to open and these aren't the type of bottles you open and drink alone – they cost too bloody much for that. This started when Jason gave me a bottle of Igor Larionov's wine for my b-day. As everybody should know Igor Larionov was the most incredibly beautiful skater and passer and playmaker in the NHL until his retirement after the last season the game was played. He has such grace on the ice, it'd make a grown-man weep. Anyway, he's huge into wine and has hooked up with an Australian wine-maker to make these exceptionally fabulous wines (or so I'm told that they're fab). I held the Igor wine out to my uncle as the carrot, as he's a big wine connoisseur, and then withheld the Igor wines in favor of the Mario Andretti wines I got when he retired in 1994. I had been saving them for a special occasion – like a second date, actually I had started out saving them (I had two bottles) for my engagement or wedding, but as the years went on my rules for a special occasion became a little less stringent. I finally gave that up, obviously, and decided to share them with my uncle. I took my two bottles of Arriverderci Mario wine over but only ended up opening one and not even finishing that as I had to drive home and my aunt didn't like it. Turns out that an older cabernet sauvignon needs to breathe a lot longer than a younger wine and that although the taste is different, it's not considered to be bad. Ah, the things I don't know about wine could fill a tome of encyclopedic size. I went home with the signed bottle still unopened, but will open it sometime this year as I don't want the taste to change much more and those chances of a second date happening ever again in this lifetime are fading fast. And the next dinner I will take the Igor wine and my uncle will swoon.

Which reminds me that I need to ask Jason for his incredibly yummy mashed potato recipe…