The most wonderful time of the year...

(This post is very poorly titled, considering what I've been up to at work.)

Newport Beach Restaurant Week #3 (I'm too tired to hunt down my reviews of the last two...I'll give you a hint, they were last January and the January before that.

Here's my short list:

Bayside--They don't seem to go all out for Restaurant Week, but it's always pretty good.
Sage--The menu looks a little better than Sage on the Coast. [If you're thinking of going to Sage on the Coast for the cougar action, you're close, but most of them will be across the parking lot at Javier's.
Pescadou Bistro--Not sure why we've never eaten here--it's within walking distance, and they do Tour de France cuisine during the Tour.
Port Restaurant--This is actually Nicole's pick. I'd place it in the "eh" category...
Zov's Cafe--Hey, that's a $20 dinner!
Tommy Bahamas--Apparently, the only restaurant offering wine pairings ($20 extra); this might be the only possible area in which Vancouver is better than Newport Beach.
21 Ocean Front--Always on my Restaurant Week list, but we never eat there. The menu usually looks a little dull, and my Ferrari is in the shop.
Nicole's picks are Palm Terrace and/or the First Cabin. Both are good restaurants and all, but they're inside hotels, and are likely to be empty. Empty restaurants give me the creeps.

Buy us beers, we're friends for life

Tim Quirk and I are now friends. I'm pretty sure my list of facebook friends is probably of no interest to anyone but me...really not even to me. I just thought I'd put it out there, in case Tim Quirk discovers my blog and forces me to change the name...for copyright infringement, or something. If that happens, I'll move the blog over to www.takealotofdrugs.mx. You can get away with anything in Mexico.

In other facebook news, this has to be one of the strangest emails I have ever received:
_________________________________________________________________________________
Nicole said on Facebook that you two are married. We need you to confirm that you
are, in fact, married to Nicole.

To confirm this relationship request, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?home.php

Thanks,
The Facebook Team
__________________________________________________________________________________

They have put me in a rather precarious situation. If I answer yes, I may be breaking the hearts of old girlfriends everywhere. If I answer no, is Nicole allowed to submit a copy of our marriage license as proof? Is she allowed to track me down to hurt me? I see no upside here. Maybe I'll pretend I didn't get the email...

Christ, you know it ain't easy...

Alternative title: It's legal to buy it, it's legal to own it and, if you're the proprietor of a hash bar, it's legal to sell it.

I feel obligated to write new resolutions every year. I used to recycle them, but now that I have this blog, I'm always afraid someone is going to look back and say: "Hey, you did that thing with the car door yesterday."

1) Bicycle more: Our amortized cost on the tandem is still well over $1 per mile. Actually, it continues to rise, as our riding does not keep up with repair costs. And that does not even include vacation expenses that would not have been incurred if we did not own a tandem. (This just in: Paris to Amsterdafm 2010). [My apologies to any accountants if my misuse of the word amortize is making you crazy.]

2) Drink better wine: Because life is too short; unfortunately, we are going to have to drink through a lot of the weeknight wine before I can even start this one. Anyone want to come over this afternoon?

3) Watch more baseball: I did not make it to a single game last year. Top Deck is an absolute steal. Also, I'll be needing a bigger tv.

Just be happy I don't twitter.

Because if I did, you would see a lot of this:

17:00 12/23/08 Stuck in traffic
18:00 12/23/08 Still stuck in traffic
18:30 12/23/08 Not out of LA. Gone 5 miles in last hour
19:00 12/23/08 Still stuck in traffic
20:00 12/23/08 Over Grapevine, not raining yet
22:00 12/23/08 Taking a nap while Nico drives
23:00 12/23/08 Starting to rain
02:30 12/24/08 California is huge
02:45 12/24/08 10 and a half hour drive, and now we're sleeping in an RV?

Nico and her sisters have gone facebook crazy. Evidently, they update their facebook pages more often than they do their blogs: #1, #2, #3. I would know for sure, but we are not yet friends.

I finally got around to updating my own facebook page. (Really all I did was add my real name to the page...I had originally created the thing because I kept getting emails from old friends who were trying to add me to their list of friends.)

Note to takealotofdrugs.com readers: Feel free to add me as a friend, but don't expect too much in the way of content over on the facebook page.

Facebook readers who happen to make it over here: Yes, this is about as good as this blog gets. And yes, if we went to elementary school together, I am dying to hear from you.

These are a few of my favorite things

Riding the cable cars for no apparent reason, except that you can buy an all day pass for $11.


The birthplace of Irish coffee. (Hey, it's not any more touristy than cable cars.)


Seeing the unexpected.


Ice skating in the middle of the City. Lasko trivia: Nico and I own our own ice skates. This might only sound unusual to my local readers . (Note: Owning your own ice skates becomes a bit of a chore, as you find yourself dragging them on vacations where you think there might be an ice skating rink. Ice skates are heavy.)

Serenity Now

A photo I snapped at the Japanese Tea Garden moments before a squirrel decided he was entitled to my bowl of crackers/cookies. I was able to wrestle the bowl away from him, but he did get away with an almond cookie. Also, he caused me to spill my cup of tea.

Score: Squirrel 2; Lasko 0

The addiction kicks into high gear...

(Alternative title was: Will someone please tell Nicole that it is a Lasko family tradition to open Hanukkah presents on the morning of Hanukkah Eve?)

(Alternative title #2 was: Screw You Bill Gates.)

Nico gave me a cool Dell Mini for this the first night of Hanukkah. (Don't be too impressed with Nicole, I think it was free as part of a promotion with the far more expensive laptop she bought for herself.)

To make things interesting, the Mini comes standard with Ubuntu...my greatest accomplishment of the year was getting pokerstars to run on the thing with only about a half hour of effort. I'll be coming to a Starbucks near you soon.

Near 18 wheel pileup



Nico and I were on our way home from a crepe run this morning when we were unfairly reprimanded for avoiding a 9 bicycle (give or take) accident.

We're the purple arrow in the picture above. We need to make a left at the fork to get home...it's not the easiest turn on a tandem even when there is no traffic, and today many other bicyclists were out enjoying the 42 degree air (actually, it was probably up to 50 for the ride home). From the left, I see at least 4 bicycles moving at considerable speed; one of them was another tandem. I didn't even bother looking right, as I knew there was no way I could make the turn ahead of these bikes. So we stopped. I was probably a foot from the right hand shoulder; I could have been a little farther over, but this was an unplanned stop. At this point, the other tandem decides to make a right (which again is a pretty difficult turn without traffic)...either their high speed, or our presence (still stopped) on the path causes them to do a rough dismount. (I say: "Nice paint" as their non-Santana appeared to be painted in the same shade of Dupont Shadeshifter as ours--my comments were ignored by the other tandem team). Before the path has cleared, 4 more bicycles come up from behind us. The last bike in line yells: "Tandem, you can't just stop there." I think he came closer to hitting one of his riding partners than us. I yelled back (a little too late): "I have to disagree".

After looking at the aerial shot, I've come to the conclusion that any bike coming from behind us should have seen us from 200 feet away. Does anyone reading this think I should have done something differently?

Don't know much about Biology

Three nights a week I have been going to ProSport Physical Therapy for an hour or two of torture. [Open that link at your own risk; my browser is telling me it's dangerous...] I'd go into great detail about the torture, except it really isn't very interesting. Now you're thinking: "Nothing on this blog is very interesting..." But I digress. ProSport is kind of interesting because they treat a lot of pro athletes. It makes me wonder, if I saw Shawn Green or Paul Kariya out of uniform, would I recognize either of them? Although their jerseys (and a hundred others) hang in the gym, I figure they would not be wearing them during their torture sessions.

Anyway, after humiliating me in an inchworm race, one of the PT aides asked how much chemistry I had to take to become a pharmacist. (You need one year of general chem to become a physical therapist, I am told).

So I counted:
1 year general chem
1 year organic chem
1 quarter analytical chem (also called quantitative analysis)
1 year biochemistry
2 years medicinal chemistry

Chemistry was not one of my stronger subjects. I would say I'm in the wrong profession, but I can't recall having the need to use any chemistry since graduating.

Just like a merit badge...

At least I think it's just like a merit badge.

The Rainbow Girls have these patchwork quilts. (Nicole has several of them, and if anybody thinks patchwork quilts are at all interesting, I can post some pictures.) I think when you accomplish something or provide some sort of service, you get a square...eventually someone sews all your squares into a quilt, and you get a quilt rack. (I can post a picture of one of those too, if anyone is interested.)

So anyway, Nicole has been gluing crucifixes and pineapples on a quilt rack over the past week; today, said quilt rack made it's way out to the garage. As I returned from bicycling, a strange woman appeared and said: "I'm here for the quilt rack." My first thought was to ask: "Who the hell are you?" But then I realized that as long as she was taking the quilt rack away, I really didn't care. After she left, I was kicking myself for not offering her another one.