aureth made it up here safe and sound, just as we expected, around 12:30 or so I think. Our stomachs were all crying out for tasty food so it wasn't long after he arrived that we made our way out to the cars and drove up to BDs for lunch. points hadn't been to one before, but Mongolian Barbeque places are all very similar, so he knew the general method behind cooking and eating at one. We were greeted at the door by Steve, who I believe is one of the shift leads, and were seated up in the bar area at one of the tables. That's a place I've not had the pleasure of sitting at before, so it was a rather unique experience. The booth was a standard "L" shape, and the table in front of us had been cut so that it was a triangle, with the 90-degree angle turned in to face the bend in the "L." I presume this was done to allow foot traffic to pass unfettered between our table an the bar itself to other portions of the area, and it seems like a pretty decent idea. It just made our dining experience rather unique in that regard.Once again Sara was waiting tables but we didn't get seated in her area because we were five persons strong this week. She came over to chat with us for a few minutes, and she seemed amused that we had again managed to "escape" having her as our waitress.
roho and seemed to take great pleasure in telling her that we would be coming back with another large crowd for a party-dinner in November (the next MFF) and I made sure to let her know that we'd be asking for her to be our waitress when the big event comes. I think that made her happy because her eyes lit up at our praise, and she confided to us that several of the employees had tried to make neutrally buoyant forks but had failed. frysco or chebutykin, do you have any pictures of that little endeavor? They want to post them on the cork board down by the receptionist.In preparing today's bowl I embarked on a slightly different procedure for preparation... I put my choice of meat in (shaved beef this week) my bowl and then went straight to the spices station. I added in my garlic, lemon pepper, cayenne pepper, black pepper and crushed red pepper with a dash of seasoned salt, letting it all sit on top of the meat before I went to the vegetable table and added my selection of peppers, onion and broccoli. Then it was back to the spice section to add in my sauce (lemon water) and oil (olive). I thought that having the spices directly upon the meat might influence the taste, and I wasn't disappointed when I finally got to taste my concoction. While I was having my bowl prepared I chatted with one of the grillers, whom I haven't learned the name of yet (I'm terrible with remembering names). I asked after the whereabouts of Joe, one of the grillers we normally bantered with. It seems Joe won't be working at BD's anymore... he won't be working anywhere for quite some time. Sadly Joe was recently busted for his third D.U.I., which means he's off in jail and will be there for some time. I feel bad for the fellow because he seemed to be a generally decent guy and was always fun to talk to, but at the same time this was his third offense. He should have gotten the hint after the first one, and if that didn't sink in his second one should have made a number of warning bells go off saying "This is unacceptably risky behavior and I can't afford to have this happen a third time to me."
Some people are slow to make such leaps of logic, I guess.
After lunch I got in the car with Aureth and drove back to the apartment while
enveri, Roho and Points stopped over at GNC to see if any of the Atkins bread had been restocked. Aureth and I lounged about and talked while we waited for the rest of the group to return, and when they did we killed a number of hours by listening to music, working on computers (Roho's PowerBook now talks on our LAN and runs basic clients like SSH and web browsing thanks to points, and then later we looked at jenwolf's machine to see if we could determine the problem. When we turned it on Points immediately commented that the bearings were dead, and I had to agree, the disk is an old SCSI drive but it had gotten far too loud to be healthy. There was also the horrible plinking sound of heads crashing on platters, and when the SCSI card reported back the device wasn't ready we knew the drive was toast) and playing games on the PS2. We all had a hand in a Fur Fighters "Fluff Match," which is cute-speak for a "Deathmatch" where all the players are engaged in a free-for-all attempting to kill off the other players as many times as possible. It's one of those things that's pretty mindless but also a lot of fun, but ends up having one major drawback; in the case of our game the drawback was how small the screen gets when there are four players (each player gets one-quarter of the TV screen assigned to them). I finally was left with sore eyes from squinting and begged off, and the rest of the gang eventually decided to lay off the game as well. I loaded up Bloody Roar 3, another favorite fighting game, and let Roho and Aureth have at one another for a while. Bloody Roar 3 is an interesting game because it's fairly popular in the mainstream culture as well as the Furry subculture. But think about it for a minute... a game where a bunch of were-creatures (moles, leopards, tigers and more, oh my!) fight one another with kung-fu moves, and the female ones jiggle cutely? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see why that one appeals so much....I spent some time online after the Fluff Match trying to give my eyes something different to deal with for a while. Liin was on again so I was happy with my choice to slip online, and spent considerable time talking with her again tonight. Eventually it was requested that we step out to get a bite to eat, so I wished her a pleasant evening and slipped back offline to go across the street with everyone else. We received the same waitress as last night, and when she saw us walk in I'm told her expression was one of amusement, shock and horror. Pity I didn't get to see it.
Dinner for me consisted of two scrambled eggs and two pieces of ham steak, which were absolutely delicious. Everyone else seemed to enjoy their meal as well, which is par for the course with the restaurant. I'm lucky to live so close to such a fine little eatery.
We had planned to go bowling with an acquaintance of Roho's after we ate, but he wasn't feeling good and none of the rest of us really wanted to go without him. One, we'd be leaving Roho and Kestral at home and feeling unwell without company and two, none of us really knew this fellow beyond Roho. A quick phone call later and the bowling game was called off, which was somewhat disappointing as it's one of the few things I can do this weekend without worrying about missing a support call or being tied down in a place where I can't respond to it within my allotted timeframe. Aureth decided that he was going to head home so the rest of us carpooled back after wishing the Cornwuff a good night. We got back to the apartment in short order and while the others sat down to watch Iron Chef I dropped online to tend to some work-related matters on my ergo keyboard. I would have loved to join everyone else out in the living room but that would require using my laptop, and my wrists positively scream when I use that device. With luck my IMAK gloves will help reduce the pain of using the laptop, as well as the pain of having these wrists at all. They're due to be delivered on the 26th, so I'm hoping that everything is okay with their sizing when they arrive. I would hate to have to send them back and wait even longer to get some relief.
Oh, one last thought... I weighed in last week on Friday, and then today. I've lost four pounds in the last seven days. Atkins really is an impressive diet for achieving weight loss -- while it certainly can't work for everyone, it seems to be doing a pretty decent job for me and many of the other people I know who are on the plan. I think I'll stay in the Induction phase for another week or so because I've got a roughly average resistance to ketosis. Once I've shed a few more pounds I'll start looking into going into the next stage of the diet plan. A bit more freedom in my dietary choices would be nice for sure.
Why don't you tell your dreams to me
