Monday, April 03, 2006
Woo-hoo!, so fucking great
So, not only is my new Italia WBC hat finally waiting for me, but the tag on the inside says HECHO EN EE.UU., unlike my Tigers cap, which is made in China. Damn, it’s good to be home.
Friday, March 24, 2006
If you're ever, I d' know, in the afterlife or something, and you have to choose between a Wendy's Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger and a Jr. BBQ Cheeseburger, definitely pick the Bacon Cheeseburger.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Gee, where to start?
Eric and I decided to take a road trip to San Diego to see the semi-final and final games of the inaugural World Baseball Classic. Well, we're here.
Let's recap from the beginning.
A little background: Since it's entirely possible that I may move (back) to Minnesota for a job that pays roughly the equivalent of twice my current salary, the idea of taking a road trip to San Diego from the Bay Area elevated itself to a higher priority in my mind. (When will I get to do this again? Maybe never.) Never mind the fact that Eric tends to get on my nerves on the road. We can hang out at my apartment with no problem, we can go see movies and stuff, but (as evidenced by our Reno trip to campaign for John Kerry) we have fundamentally different ideas about travel. And driving stresses me out.
With that in mind, I found two sets of tickets for the final three games at barely over face value on craigslist.org, and after a series of rather detailed emails, handed eight twenty-dollar bills to a guy through his car window at a bus stop outside Balboa Park BART in exchange for the tickets (not as sketchy as it sounds), reserved a car with Enterprise, and talked to three upper-level managers at work about taking two days off. (It should have been less of a hassle, but I work at a non-profit that's a little understaffed, we have a huge event coming up on March 25th, and my boss just took two weeks off to tour the Midwest with his band. It still should have been less of a hassle than it was.)
I didn't make a lot of time to pack, what with my standing social engagements on Wednesday (sometimes Tuesday) and Thursday. Had I thought ahead a little more than usual, I would have packed Tuesday night for my Friday night trip. But who does that? Not me. ("Not I," I should[n't] say.)
Friday night, then, was a whirlwind. I left work at 5:15 to be driven to the Enterprise office a mile north of where I work in downtown Oakland. (Despite being a company whose core business is related to cars, which I despise, Enterprise has actually consistently impressed me with superior customer service.) I waited around for an hour at the chaos that is Enterprise, and finally drove off in a Pontiac Grand Am missing a hubcap. (Which was an upgrade, since I am paying for an "compact" car. The secret to car rental, in my mind, is to reserve something cheap online to pick up late on Friday evening. You basically get whatever is left, which invariably is an upgrade from "economy" or "compact." I never have the nerve to actually reserve the cheapest class, "economy," because I'm afraid they might actually give me a Toyota Echo (read "clown car"), and though I'm not one who is particularly conscious of status symbols, I would actually be embarrassed to be seen in one of those.
Next: packing, picking up Eric in Redwood city.
Eric and I decided to take a road trip to San Diego to see the semi-final and final games of the inaugural World Baseball Classic. Well, we're here.
Let's recap from the beginning.
A little background: Since it's entirely possible that I may move (back) to Minnesota for a job that pays roughly the equivalent of twice my current salary, the idea of taking a road trip to San Diego from the Bay Area elevated itself to a higher priority in my mind. (When will I get to do this again? Maybe never.) Never mind the fact that Eric tends to get on my nerves on the road. We can hang out at my apartment with no problem, we can go see movies and stuff, but (as evidenced by our Reno trip to campaign for John Kerry) we have fundamentally different ideas about travel. And driving stresses me out.
With that in mind, I found two sets of tickets for the final three games at barely over face value on craigslist.org, and after a series of rather detailed emails, handed eight twenty-dollar bills to a guy through his car window at a bus stop outside Balboa Park BART in exchange for the tickets (not as sketchy as it sounds), reserved a car with Enterprise, and talked to three upper-level managers at work about taking two days off. (It should have been less of a hassle, but I work at a non-profit that's a little understaffed, we have a huge event coming up on March 25th, and my boss just took two weeks off to tour the Midwest with his band. It still should have been less of a hassle than it was.)
I didn't make a lot of time to pack, what with my standing social engagements on Wednesday (sometimes Tuesday) and Thursday. Had I thought ahead a little more than usual, I would have packed Tuesday night for my Friday night trip. But who does that? Not me. ("Not I," I should[n't] say.)
Friday night, then, was a whirlwind. I left work at 5:15 to be driven to the Enterprise office a mile north of where I work in downtown Oakland. (Despite being a company whose core business is related to cars, which I despise, Enterprise has actually consistently impressed me with superior customer service.) I waited around for an hour at the chaos that is Enterprise, and finally drove off in a Pontiac Grand Am missing a hubcap. (Which was an upgrade, since I am paying for an "compact" car. The secret to car rental, in my mind, is to reserve something cheap online to pick up late on Friday evening. You basically get whatever is left, which invariably is an upgrade from "economy" or "compact." I never have the nerve to actually reserve the cheapest class, "economy," because I'm afraid they might actually give me a Toyota Echo (read "clown car"), and though I'm not one who is particularly conscious of status symbols, I would actually be embarrassed to be seen in one of those.
Next: packing, picking up Eric in Redwood city.
OK, so I don’t know whose network SkyHigh Speed is, but as Jason just said, “You appear to be on.” He found a room considerably cheaper than last night, a single, off 8, next to my sister’s college. He was slick enough to get a single this time; let me crash on the floor. We got an ADA-compliant room, with a wheelchair ramp and Warp Speed controls on the toilet. I feel like Captain Kirk. Jason asked the hotel attendant, “Oh, don’t you have to keep the wheelchair-accessible room open?” “The room doesn’t know the difference!” he responded. The plan today, we think, is to take the trolley to San Ysidro + cross the border. Jason doesn’t seem absolutely enthralled by the impending culture clash that is Tijuana, nor the American depravity and dens of iniquity catering to it that come at night. Mostly it’s the novelty of crossing a political border, and, like, fuck, we’re here, and since Jason will probably not be back in SoCal for a long, long while, and I’m always proposing a hypothetical road trip to Mexico anyway, I think he's interested to see “Mexico” (not really Mexico).
