Monday: Escape!

Healthy lasagna with spinach and lemon ricotta.

Lemon ricotta is really good here, and probably in similar use-cases.

This sounds like a superhero.

Then escape room, where we solved all the puzzles with only one small hint in the bonus "extra-hard" bit.  Not bad, but we probably could have sorted it out if we had thought clearer about it.

I don't even know who this guy is.

Heatmor?  Whatever.

Then planning and shopping and cleaning for NYE.  One side benefit: getting bbq:

Yummy delicious bbq.  The brisket cooled a lot between the store and home, but that isn't really that big of a problem.

• I saw this chair yesterday, and kind of really want one, but with a back.  I 100% prefer to sit in my office chair crosslegged, and this would make that much easier and more comfortable.

"There's a lizard in my water glass!"

Today was a busy day.  First thing was to wake up early to drive over to the airport and turn in my travel voucher.  This completes the planning for the Christmas/New Year travel-stravaganza, so now I can worry about other things.

Work work work work work work work.

I left early so I could finish up my Thanksgiving shopping.  I think I finally have everything I need, so tomorrow evening will be full of prep work and pre-cooking as much as possible.  My hope is to be able to only have to do a minimal amount of work on Thursday proper.

After arriving home, I pull into the parking garage, and see this standing by the bike rack:

Well, not exactly, but the dog totally had this expression. Via Hyperbole and a Half.

There was a dog, standing by herself with leash and harness still attached, watching everything I did.  Someone had put out a bowl of water for her, and I asked her a few questions, but she was thoroughly sad, and thoroughly scared, and wasn't really in the question answering mood.  I had planned on telling the security guard about her, but noticed a note taped to the elevator buttons pointing out pretty much what I was going to say: "Super scared sad dog, hiding on the third floor parking garage, wondering where her owner has escaped to."  I was going to take some pastrami down on my way back out, but after looking closely at the pastrami, decided that it probably wasn't going to help any.

Luckily, by the time I went back downstairs, the note was gone, as was the dog, so hopefully everything was resolved in the end.

Tonight was finally the night the David Sedaris show I bought a ticket for four months ago:

I did choose a wonderful seat:

I just realized I should start resizing these panoramas. Also, I gave up on fixing the railing.

It was an entertaining show, conveniently full of stories and jokes I'd not heard (or read) before.  I think that's probably the best way to do it.  I like hearing the same stories on the CDs, but I'm glad none of this had appeared in any of the books of his I have.

It was unfortunate to hear that within 24 hours of landing in Hawaii, he'd had his laptop/passport/important documents stolen from his rental house.  Then again, I guess if I were going to run a house burglary operation, checking rental houses for new tenants isn't a bad strategy to use.

About halfway through the show, David went to refill his glass from the bottle of water, when he noticed that a gecko had apparently crawled up the leg of the stool, scaled the glass, and ended up dunked in the water.  He was able to fish the gecko out, and sat it on the podium, where he noted that it was "shaking its tail around," possibly "to dry off."  Later in the show, he made a few comments that suggested that perhaps the swim had been slightly more fatal than originally implied, but no definitive statement was made on the final condition of the gecko.

Friday: tapas

Placeholder post to remind me to edit this with details tomorrow. And I may need t back date it. Might as welll throw a link to that david sedaris video too.

I arrived in Austin around 1:00, and apparently was in a jetlag-induced haze until dinner.  At which point I forgot to take pictures.  Crap.  In any case, we went to Simplicity wine bar to do a tapas style dinner.  I'm probably going to miss items, but as far as I can remember, we had:

• Spinach artichoke dip
• Papas aioli
• Wilted spinach salad
• Sauteed calamari
• Crawfish bisque
• Wasn't there a meat thing, too?

It was good, and the crawfish bisque was certainly a better soup than the one at Luke's.

For Kyle and Julie

As I had mentioned on twitter, I was going to see Julie's hatred of Arby's and Kyle's unfamiliarity of Arby's by going there myself.

It was delicious.

I also went to the B&N next door, where I found a "this book is too cheap not to buy, plus I really don't have any books that qualify as humor that I'm reading right now."