Great Weekend

This was a great weekend. It started Thursday night with a chill happy hour at my favorite bar, Bar Food. It is practically across the street from our apartment, and they serve only beer, wine, and whiskey. Oh, and the most amazing fried potato puffs with a curry aioli. AND they give you a free hot dog for every drink you order during happy hour. Then we went on a bar crawl in Westwood with a bunch of his classmates. Here is a funny pic of Mike and I at Bar Food.

Friday we awoke early and slightly hungover and went on a micropub tour with the MicroBrew Club from his school. 14 young adults and a driver piled into a 15 passenger van and drove to San Diego to tour and taste at Stone Brewing. It was beautiful there, nothing like the industrial Budweiser plant I had visited in northern California years ago. After the tour we tasted 4 beers, a pale ale, a porter, an IPA and an ale called Arrogant Bastard, which I think is a hysterical name for a beer. I talked the bar tender into giving me a little taste of their russian stout, too, which was my favorite. We then dined alfresco with pretty darn good food, and yes another beer. We dined so leisurely that we had to cut out one of the remaining two breweries from our trip, and the second we changed to a nearby brew house. Lost Abbey was equally impressive. They had tasters for a $1, which was awesome. They had a huge bar in their brew house with fermenting tanks in the back and empty kegs for bar stools. I got home exhausted.

Mike with the 1/6 kegs. We thought it would be best to strap them on your back like jet packs.

Us in the garden

Yesterday was a chill day with a Target run and no alcohol whatsoever. We watched The Town and exercised. Today we lazed in bed most of the morning, Mike went to softball practice and I went to the market. You can read about my market adventures on my food blog. And finally, I got the pants beat off me at tennis practice today. We had 3 people practicing on the court, so we took turns being the 1 person versus the 2. And it was tough, with 2 players much better than me running me all over the court. But, all in all an excellent weekend.

Never too far from home...

We're at a BevMo in LA and do I find? Sudwerk beer.

For those of you who don't know, Sudwerk is a restaurant in Davis that brews its own beer (kinda like BJs). I remember seeing it for sale in and around Davis but I didn't expect to see it all the way down here in LA.

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A Couple Nights at the Movies

My mom and I have gone to see two movies since I've been home: Black Swan and Rango. I don't think there is anything I can say about Black Swan that hasn't already been said by other critics. But I loved watching all the dancing and I thought that Natalie Portman really did a stellar job bringing out the crazy. And can I just say that my every time my skin itched for two days after I thought I was growing feathers (which, let's be honest, would be pretty awesome.)

Rango was cute. My mom and I went on a Thursday night and there wasn't a child in the theater. In fact, there were only two other guys in there, which now that I think about it was kind of odd. But anyways, Johnny Depp in lizard form was adorable. Speaking of crazy, he was a little of that, too. You could certainly hear Jack Sparrow and the Mad Hatter in some of his scenes. The movie took on an interesting and somewhat political topic, especially for an animated feature. It was all about water and the power one can obtain when controlling it. Spoiler alert: it ended happily. Of course it did. It is a cartoon.

Mike saw Battle: LA. From what I understand, it was awesome in the same terrible way of The Day After Tomorrow  and 2012. I'm a little jealous, I must admit. Apparently Santa Monica gets wiped out. I'd like to see that (in a movie, only, mind you.)

Pink Fingers, Purple Toes, and Curly Hair

I had the opportunity to come home for a couple weeks to visit with my parents. I hated to leave Mike on his own during finals. I've missed spoiling him probably as much as he has missed eating good meals and not having to do the dishes afterward. But, he's a big boy, and as he's managed just fine on his own. He's finishing up his last final as I type, and I understand that there is to be class-wide whoops of joy and bar-hopping in celebration of their completed second quarter.

While Mike was studying the intricacies of corporate finance, I had a beauty day. My mom and I went Monday morning to get our nails done. While I was working in DC, the occasional pedicure was a treat for my aching feet that were stuck in heels all day. Since I don't have a job, getting my nails done has been a luxury that has gone by the wayside, substituted by home paint jobs. So I relished the time in the massage chair, closed my eyes as my calves, feet, arms, and hands were massaged, and picked the brightest most awesome (read: obnoxious) colors for my nails. That afternoon I headed to the hair salon. Two and a half hours later I emerged with a new cut and new curls. I smelled like a chemical plant, but I looked good.

One Down, Two To Go

I'm in the midst of Winter Quarter finals right now. This morning I suffered through Marketing. The final consisted of analyzing a case and developing a marketing strategy for the firm/product in question. The case we got today was about Rohm and Haas, a large chemical company, and their problems introducing a new metalworking microbiocide. What is a metalworking microbiocide you may be asking yourself. Well, I'm still not really sure, even though I read a 12 page case and wrote a 7 page marketing paper on it. It has something to do with killing bacteria and fungi in the water lubricant that metal working shops use in their machines. Anyways, I got through it somehow and now, most importantly, I never have to take another marketing class in my life! Some of marketing was interesting enough, but after 15 weeks and 2 poor professors, I just don't think I'm going to risk it. I guess if I wanted to go into marketing, I should have tried harder to get into Kellogg, Wharton or Stanford.

Anyways, I've moved on to Operations today, and boy, this is not fun. As one of my classmates so aptly put it: "tomorrow is going to be a bloodbath." I fully agree, but I've got another hour or so of studying left tonight and hopefully I'll get lucky with the questions tomorrow morning. After that its on to Corporate Finance, which should also be a whopper, but only because the professor said its going to be more qualitative than quantitative. If it was a quant test, I wouldn't have any problem, but word problems and theories are quite as easy.

The worst part of finals this quarter is not the finals themselves, but that fact that Megan is out of town. She's back in Hot-lanta visiting family. Her being out of town creates two problems: first, she's gone and that's never fun; and second, she always cooks for me during finals, making my life so much easier. Today I was relegated to having Costco pizza for lunch and leftover pasta for dinner. Such is life I guess.

Wendy's Commercial

As we were walking through Westwood today we ran into the scene seen below. Wendys was conducting market research on its new fries and giving away free samples. Never one to turn down free food, Megan and I decided to venture over test them out. In addition they were shooting interviews for a commercial. We passed the prescreening and lined up to get on camera but alas, the director decided he had seen enough just as we got to the front of the line. No TV time for us.

Oh yeah, the fries aren't bad. Wendys uses real potatoes now and sea salt instead of iodized salt. Pretty tasty.

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Sniff, Sniff

It has been a crummy week. I spent last weekend being sick with a cold, and by the end of the week, Mike was suffering from the same thing. It is funny how we can have the same virus but it affects us so differently. I had sinus pressure and a wickedly sore throat. Mike had a headache, sinus pressure, coughing, and a nose that ran from here to China. Here is the evidence:

That is a small trash can full of only Mike's tissues. One word: GROSS. We spent most of the weekend on the couch, Mike whining and me trying to nurse him back to health. I didn't fix any chicken and matza balls or dumplings, but I think he did eat two cans of soup in one day.

I think we are both better now. Thank goodness, since he has finals coming up in the next week, and I'm leaving Wednesday to go to Atlanta for a couple weeks.

About Thursday we were both doing OK, and we had a fun evening on campus at CRAVE, where we tasted wines from Pasa Robles region in California. I can't wait to go there. There were some very good wines, and most for a reasonable cost. They also served pasta and cheese. Have I mentioned how much I love cheese? I think I had 3 plates of just cheese and crackers. It was great because I could sip several different wines and eat the same cheese and the cheese would taste slightly different every time. And the wine would taste different depending on what cheese I just ate. It's edible magic!