The Bigger, Blacker Box
Posted on November 19, 2013 by Ching under Games.
My box expansion for Cards Against Humanity arrived yesterday. Complete with foam blocks and other surprises.
There’s a bonus card hidden inside the lid.
I think that is the best part really. It only came with 20 new cards and they’re not as good as the cards from the original game and the first three expansions. I mean, they’re about boxes. Blech. However, the web site advertises that I can use the big box as a bludgeon. So that’s something. Though I haven’t tried it — yet.
Speaking of games, Brian and I learned a new game yesterday. It’s called Nertz. It’s the party game of choice at Brian’s work Christmas party, which we’ve missed for the last couple of years because it always falls on the same night as my work Christmas party and we always end up going to mine. This year we are fortunate that the two Christmas parties are on separate weekends so we can finally attend. Anyway, we just learned about the game yesterday so we’ve been practicing. We’re not very competitive. Can you tell?
Oh, Brian wanted me to point out that he won every single round we played tonight. I think it’s his Brian pills. He has an unfair advantage. Lucky for me, we’re playing on the same team come the night of the Christmas party. We’re taking this baby down!
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Date Night
Posted on November 17, 2013 by Ching under Date Ideas, Events, Food and Drink.
Brian and I started our date night at Taste and See 2 in Old Town.
The restaurant has been open for several weeks now, but this is our first trip there since we both have been very busy.
Chef Jason Febres and Steven Bacci have really stepped it up. The place looks fantastic and the server uniforms look really spiffy.
We started dinner with one of our favorite tapas: queso fondue.
Brian had his usual, the real Cubano with truffle fries.
I wanted to be adventurous and try something that I’d never had before, the saltinbocca. How can you go wrong with chicken and prosciutto?
It was delicious. I even liked the mushroom and the cracker thing.
We left the restaurant very full and happy. The beers helped. đŸ˜‰
After dinner we went on to Abode to watch Blockhead perform. Reby and Aaron were there also. Come to find out, Aaron is a huge Blockhead fan.
We actually got a real treat last night. I had no idea that Aaron is Cutter J, the Absurdist. He’s amazing!
He makes music, plays with spoons, and even tap dances.
Oh, and Blockhead was really good too.
Brian really enjoyed date night. He thanked me several times for taking him to see Blockhead. Yup. That’s what I do. I plan great dates. LOL.
Here’s a link to Taste & See 2 on Urbanspoon.
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It’s the Little Things
Posted on November 16, 2013 by Ching under Confessions.
A year ago I was invited to attend a super secret meeting with Don, Jim, and some hotel chain execs who were vetting Wichita as a possible location for their newest call center. I put on my best suit for the meeting but something was noticeably missing.
Don and Jim both had fancy name tags. “Don’t you have one of these?” Jim asked. I didn’t have one then, but guess what. I have one now — thanks to the Operations team. We were all given these fancy metal name tags at the Operations leadership conference that I attended this week.
I joked to coworker/friend Sally that they had to switch to the fancy metal nameplates in place of the sticker ones so that she wouldn’t feel people up under the guise of helping them keep their name tag sticker on. So she actually gets credit for getting us all fancy metal name tags. LOL.
Jokes aside, it’s the little things that make my day. Believe it or not, I was really excited to finally get my very own fancy name tag. I have arrived!
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Post Halloween Party Aftermath
Posted on November 9, 2013 by Ching under Food and Drink, Home Ownership.
We picked up a little before we went to bed after the party last weekend, but this is the mess that we woke up to the next day.
Rather than deal with the mess straight off, Brian and I decided that this was the perfect excuse to go have brunch at a new place, Birds on the Roof Bakery & Cafe. We’d heard many good things.
The place is actually quite nice. I really like the colorful decor.
The place is kind of quirky. I like the cloth napkins, novel napkin rings, and even mismatched silverware.
The fancy water glasses are nice too, but they don’t hold much water. It wouldn’t be so bad if they refilled the water glass more frequently. I kept running out of water and it would take forever between refills.
The runny eggs were strike two. Brian specifically asked for them to be fried hard.
The bacon was good but the damage was done. Brian did not want to touch his eggs but he didn’t want to ask for them to get redone either so I ended up eating them.
There’s not many places in town you can get crepes, so that is what I ordered. Here are a couple of pictures of my chicken and spinach crepe.
I was not particularly impressed. The crepe itself was too thick and more pancake-like than I prefer. They put a lot of filling in it also which is both good and bad. It’s great that you get more chicken for your money, but all of the filling overpowered the crepe and made it even less crepe-like. Sad to say this but the chicken florentine crepe that I had at a kiosk inside the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando when we were there for the Zumba instructor convention was far superior (even if I did have to eat it out of a water cone, LOL).
Here’s the dessert display case. For a bakery, it wasn’t very impressive. It looked kind of sad and empty actually. If you’re going to tack “bakery” at the end of your name, I’m going to expect more than this sad display case. When I think of a restaurant and bakery, the display cases I’m envisioning are the likes of Bagatelle (fantastic cakes, by the way, and they always give you free dessert which is a bonus) and Copper Oven. Their bakery here seemed like an afterthought.
They served an English muffin with Brian’s breakfast and I asked for toast, neither of these tasted like they were baked on site. They gave us this hard French roll while we were waiting for our food and that didn’t taste freshly baked either. I would have much rather had Tita Tessie’s pan de sal over it.
As far as the price goes, their prices are pretty reasonable. No complaints there. Service was slow, but it wasn’t terrible, and the runny eggs were not the servers fault so we gave her $4 bucks, which is a decent tip relative the cost of our meal. We looked at the ticket and she wrote it down correctly, Brian and I concluded that the cook either wasn’t paying attention or didn’t know how to make a hard egg.
I really wanted to like this place because other people I know have loved it, but everything I liked about the place had nothing to do with the food. I like the clever name. The location is great. The restaurant has a wonderful ambiance. I like having cloth napkins and real silverware. The decor is nice and cheerful. All of that stuff is fabulous so if I’m just going there to hang out, I would totally love the place. As far as the food goes, I’ve had better breakfast meals elsewhere, so if I’m looking for somewhere to eat Birds on the Roof wouldn’t be my first pick.
On the bright side, when we came home from breakfast we were ready to tackle the aftermath of the previous night’s party. We still need to do some deep cleaning (vacuuming and mopping, etc.) but we picked up the mess and wiped all of the surfaces. Look at what we accomplished.
Our house was back to normal in no time. Of course, we were still pooped from having stayed up all night so we ended up taking a nap after this and didn’t wake up again until five in the afternoon. That was pretty much our Sunday.
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Halloween is Easily My Favorite Time of Year
Posted on November 3, 2013 by Ching under Events.
I love this time of year not because I enjoy turning a year older but because there’s always so much going on. It’s usually around this time that I get my annual epic massage (the rest of the time we’re just getting deluxe massages). I actually like it better now that I’ve switched to deluxe massages for my regular massage because it makes the epic massages that much more special when I do have them.
Besides that, this is also around the time of Brew Ha-Ha at Flints Hills National. It is our most favorite fundraising event.
It was even more fun this year because several of my friends from work attended also. Darcy and Jason (above) attended. Derek, Carmen, Nick, Suzanne and her husband, Bridget and her husband, and Reed and his wife were just some of the ones we got to hang out with at the event. I heard that Don and Denise were there too as well as Jim and Carol, but we didn’t ever run into them.
We also ran into some friends we don’t ever get to see Sarah and Tony Patterson and Ann and Jeremey Wilcoxon. I went to grad school with Sarah at Wichita State. We both completed our MBAs in 2008. Brian and I met Ann and Jeremey at Jeff and Stacy Christensen’s sushi party years ago and we’ve been running into them at Brew Ha-Ha ever since. Not a lot of people in my department at work were interested in Brew Ha-Ha when I first started attending so it was always nice (and still is, even though there’s a bigger group from my work attending these days) to see some familiar faces.
Anyway, that’s one of the reasons that I love having a Facebook account. Being connected on Facebook makes me feel so much more intimately connected with friends who I only get to see once every few years.
I hadn’t had a real vacation since this crazy year started so for my birthday I treated myself to a couple of days of vacation, with no specific agenda in mind. Brian was actually surprised as that is not my style. I’m never one to waste a vacation day. I only take vacation days whenever we are traveling somewhere, I have a test or school project, I have some sort of medical or dental appointment, etc. I am so crazy that when Brian wants take a vacation day to veg around the house, I actually either talk him out of it or come up with errands or some sort of agenda for him so as not to waste a vacation day. I’m just not the sleeping in and vegging kind of person. I prefer my days to have purpose.
As luck would have it, I got to spend my vacation days Ching-style. Bybee Electric arrived at 8:30 AM on Thursday to work on moving the power outlet for our new range and Brian’s mom came over around the same time on Friday while their house, which is about to be no longer theirs (they accepted an offer on it) was inspected. I didn’t get to sleep in on either of my vacation days, which is fine by me. I prefer to have something going on than nothing anyways.
I took advantage of my free time on Friday to pick up some last minute party supplies (paper plates and plastic forks and stuff). I also picked up some take out from Panda Express for lunch. Brian came home so the three of us — Donna, Brian, and I — had a nice lunch together.
After Brian and his mom left, I spent the afternoon getting a pedicure at Serenity in Derby (their pedicure area is pretty but not that comfortable; I couldn’t fully relax and lean back because the bench is stationary/fixed to the wall and not adjustable so it’s not ideal for short people). They had a $25 Autumn spice pedicure special though, so it was worth a shot. Besides, it gave me an excuse to stop by mom and dad’s.
My hair appointment at Sami Halaseh followed. It’s another place I haven’t tried but I got a gift certificate for a free Aveda perfume for my birthday so I looked up different Aveda salons in town. I only get my hair cut about two or three times a year so I’m not attached to a particular salon or stylist (unlike my waxings which occur every couple of weeks pretty much; I would be a mess if Patricia moves or retires). In my world a haircut is a luxury but a waxing is a necessity. LOL. Anyway, the important part is that I felt like my two vacation days were worthwhile and productive.
The one thing that bummed me out is that I wasn’t at work on Halloween so I missed out on seeing everyone in their creative costumes.
Lucky for me, I have awesome coworkers who sent me pictures so it almost felt like I was there. Thanks, Isaac! These are just a few of the people in costume. I heard that the participation rate was so much better this year. I can’t believe I missed it!
Speaking of Isaac, I’m also disappointed that I missed seeing him get a pie to the face. LOL. It was all in good fun, though.
I always have to come up with multiple costume ideas every year. I’m a joiner so I try to participate in work activities whenever I can. Halloween is one of my favorites. So I can always count on needing a work-appropriate costume for work and several other costumes for the Halloween parties.
We had a Halloween poker thing at Rune’s last weekend, which fell on the same night as the Fabulous Fleshtones’ annual Halloween bash. I think it’s the first time that we missed it. Although, when we went last year Brian got a speeding ticket so understandably we wanted to do something different this year.
Here are some photos from the Halloween poker party at Rune’s…
I dressed as a black bird. Brian was supposed to be a bird watcher, but we couldn’t find his binoculars so he just ended up looking like a tourist. I don’t think I got any photos of him from that night.
Albert won the costume contest. Dressing in drag always trumps all other costumes it seems. We’ll have to do better next year. =P
Rune’s parties are awesome because poker is usually involved, there’s always plenty of food, and his “loser’s lounge” is a slick movie theater room. You almost want to lose on purpose. Okay, not really.
Since Rune got dibs on October 26, we had to move our Halloween party to November 2. It worked out because we got to start something new, what we now call a “Post-Halloween Bash” which is perfect in all aspects because costumes are always cheaper right after Halloween. And, who says costumes are only reserved for Halloween? We also got an extra hour of revelry because Sunday is when we fell back out of DST.
Here are some of my favorite photos from the party last night…
Our favorite Vikings, Rune and Kristen…
Zumba ladies in the house!
David and Donna came as packing boxes.
Our favorite Romans, Paul, Carla, and Elrond…
Our favorite sisters…
Our favorite rednecks, Laura and Chad…
I must say, the Google glasses finish off the look! LOL.
Catniss and Prince. All I have to say is that I’m glad I’m not the only one who had to keep explaining my costume all night. Thank you, Hideki!
Domestic goddess with her favorite 70s pornstar, Jay Dildo. =P
Christina and Kasey.
Paul found his spot on the sectional and didn’t budge for most of the evening.
There were so many costumes I loved, Alison’s costume is one of them.
If you don’t get it, you need to watch this video.
Thank you to Andrea and Hideki for my PSN card, and to Meader for bringing all his Rock Band games and the spare guitar. We are going to need to invest in our set up because we were slumming it last night.
There’s always some crazy, weird things going on…
We had more people at the house last night than we’ve ever had. I was amazed. I always invite a ton of people, but usually people don’t show up. That is kind of what I expected for the most part.
Brian said he was actually glad that some of the people we were expecting couldn’t make it because we were running out of places to put everyone. We put the leaf in the breakfast table so we could seat eight there in addition to the eight at the regular dining table and we still had no room. People were everywhere. Brian thought our floor would cave from all the weight. LOL.
We finally just had to direct the people who were done eating downstairs. The best way to do that was to move the booze down there. Rock Band promptly commenced. But then Rock Band was so loud that we had to move Cards Against Humanity upstairs because we couldn’t hear each other. It was a night of improvisation.
Anyway, the house passed its stress test as did Brian. For the first time ever, we made a big enough mess that we couldn’t pick everything up before bed. I hate, hate, hate leaving a mess but we didn’t have a choice. We were both pooped. We actually didn’t get everything put back to normal until today.
Whew! So glad that is over. Until next year!
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