birthday dinner

March 30, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So in the last post I mentioned it was Kathy's birthday yesterday, but forgot to include what we did. I think the car stuff sort of threading through my tale confused me and got me off track. Anyway...

Mid-afternoon we headed out to Manhattan Beach and hung out there for a few hours. Surprisingly the water was really nice, and we went in for a swim. I think surfreport listed the water temp at 60, which isn't bad at all for the Pacific right now.

After coming back and getting all cleaned up we got in the car and pointed ourselves toward Hollywood (though really southwest Hollywood) where I had made dinner reservations at Citrine on Melrose. Now, looking at the menu on their website you see a "prix fixe" section, with a very moderate price. Uhhh... That's not actually on their menu. Instead they have a chef's tasting menu, which is quite a bit more than that. Kathy's only going to turn 21 once, though, so we went ahead and both got that with the wine selections (I try to be fancy every once in a while). The food was excellent.

Course one was a calamari salad, which really wasn't much of a salad. It was more just calamari with some accompaniments for flavour. I won't even attempt to remember what the wine choices were. Our waiter (who was great) would tell us what each one was, but for me it was really in one ear and out the other. Course two was a soup, a little potatoe cake, and a crawfish. I had to ask our waiter how you eat a crawfish -- I knew you ate the tail but I didn't know the approved way to go about that. Then there was a little sorbet to cleanse the palate. Course three was a fish... I think Halibut? In any case very tender and very good. The plate also had artichoke hearts, and I can't remember what else. Course four was lamb, with some peas and corn. All were very well presented. For dessert we substituted from what had been on the tasting menu. I went for a Baileys souffle and Kathy had the apple tres leches.

Oh... I almost forgot the best part. Before course one there was a cucumber soup, presented in a tall shot glass (maybe double shot sized). I thought that was cool.

It was a Monday night, so the restaurant was pretty empty. They let us choose where we wanted to sit, and Kathy chose a nice corner booth. Since the place wasn't busy it felt like every dish was a bit of a group project where the kitchen was concerned. You'd see a lot of one person preparing a dish while one or two more stood and watched.

My only problem with the evening? The valet guy. He came to my door instead of Kathy's, which I thought was just kind of weird. I thought the first thing they taught you in valet school was that you always open the door for the lady first. Odd.

All in all a very good evening, though my wallet probably won't give me a return trip any time soon.

roundup time

March 30, 2004 by Eric Richardson

It feels like forever since I last managed to scribble a few words here, but really it was just Thursday. Let's see if I can put together what's happened since then...

Thursday and Friday we got to hang out with my sister Amy, which was cool. Being halfway across the country I don't get to see her very often, and I don't know when else I would have gotten to see her play softball. I saw her hit her first college homerun and have a game where she went 3 for 3 with 5 RBIs.

Friday night my dad and I went with Taylor to see U of A play the USA Olympic Team.

Saturday morning I flew back to LAX. Kathy picked me up at the airport and dropped me off at my apartment. I went upstairs, grabbed dirty clothes out of my bag, threw a couple new things in, grabbed a pair of waterski gloves and headed down to my car. Waiting to meet me in our basement parking area was the fact that sometime between Wednesday and Saturday my car got broken into, and my cd player got stolen. I had far more important stuff (wakeboards, etc) in my trunk, but those got left untouched. All that got taken was the cd player (6 years old with a tendency to skip), my garage door opener, and a pair of sunglasses (prescription no less, so they'll be fun to wear). More annoying was that they broke the front passenger side lock to get in, and getting a new handle and lock cylinder is about $300 with installation.

But I didn't really worry about any of that on Saturday. Saturday I wanted to waterski. So I cleaned things up a bit, stopped by campus to pick someone up, and headed out to Mecca, CA -- the absolute middle of nowhere. Private ski lakes are always out in the boonies, and this was no exception. This was a pre-season warmup/fundraiser for the USD Waterski Team. We skiied Saturday, stayed up late, and then the sun woke everyone up for a bit more skiing on Sunday.

Got back to LA mid-afternoon Sunday, laid down for a bit to recover from four straight days of sun, and then headed to Chili's and then to church. There were two new Simpsons on Sunday night, but I only watched one. I'll download the other and add it to my collection, which currently stands at around 275 episodes (there have been 320 or so total, I think).

Monday -- yesterday -- was Kathy's birthday. Before I could do anything about that, though, I had to take care of actually filing a police report and such for my break-in. So a nice little chunk of my morning was spent sitting at Southwest Division. Generally you'd just do something like that over the phone, but I got a couple busy signals and figured I'd just head down and take care of things in person. It wasn't an unpleasant process at all. Next I took my car to Toyota Central, conveniently located under the 10 on Fig. As I knew they would, they found a bunch of other things that really needed to be done to my car. Leaving the lake on Sunday the USD coach asked me, "You got a supercharger in that Camry?" Turns out, no, it's just a head pipe falling apart. That the kind of thing that's fun to hear on a Tuesday morning.

So now I'm working on catching up on all the things that got left a little behind -- like school, for instance. I think life will be a little more normal for the next while, though, which is good.

wifi: Ike's Coffee & Tea, Tucson, AZ

March 25, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Sitting in Tucson, AZ, catching up on some email at Ike's Coffee & Tea. I'm here in Tucson for a few days watching my sister play softball, but this afternoon my dad and I both needed to catch up on some work, so we headed here. This is definitely what a wifi coffee house should be like. I counted seven laptops when we walked in, most plugged into four-outlet boxes scatterred along the walls. Connectivity is plenty responsive, though I'm not thorough enough to actually run a speed check like Alan would.

Two more games tomorrow and then Saturday I fly back to LA, hop in a car, and head out to Mecca, CA, to go waterskiing.

time flies, change moves slowly

March 23, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Fixing a bug in my this date function I ran across a post from four years ago talking about porting stuff to CSS. It's crazy to think that it's been that long, but at the same time I can't imagine what life was like beforehand. Sure, this is a horse that's been beaten to death, but CSS is amazing. I ran across the CSS Zen Garden yesterday. The idea's very cool: take one HTML file and show how different it can look using just different stylesheets. Most of the looks are a little graphics heavy for doing list heads, etc, but still it's a cool demo.

wifi: Scouting Tucson

March 23, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I mentioned the other day that I'm headed to Tucson tomorrow for a few days. While there I still need to keep up on some work and such, so I took a minute to google for free wifi there today (not Google's local search). It seems there are a good number of wifi-enabled coffee shops around, so getting Internet access shouldn't be that big of a deal. Also of interest is that downtown Tucson will be getting a wifi network. I can't find a timeline for this, though, so I don't think that it's something that's functioning yet.