Weekend Recap-a-licious

I realized that I was getting a bit wordy, so decided to split up the “today sucks” post from the “weekend” post. 🙂 There’s really no rhyme or reason to the breaks, I just got long-winded.

The weekend was pretty good, and fairly quiet (and spent indoors, thank goodness). Thursday, and I went to Georgia Brown’s for dinner, after our horrid dinner at Fin a few months back, they sent me some dining certificates to make up for it and since Fin no longer exists, we figured a little low country cooking wouldn’t be a bad thing, plus GB’s made Everett a grits-lover. (You have no idea how many times I heard “Oh I hate grits, I just don’t like ’em” before we ate there for my birthday) We were able to order some of the more expensive items and it was GOOD. I had Louisiana “Devil” Shrimp — Tender Gulf Shrimp Stuffed with Georgia Brown’s Crabcakes, Served with Sauteed Spinach, Macaroni and Cheese, and a Sweet and Spicy Chipotle Sauce and he had A Trio of Crab Cakes — A Georgia Brown’s Crabcake, a Smoked Trout Crabcake, and a spicy Crawfish Crab Cake served with sauteed Asparagus, warm grilled Potato Salad and finished with a trio of sauces. I had no trouble cleaning my plate and even picking at his, we left happy and stuffed and that’s really all you can ask from most restaurants.

Friday was pretty slow, I was off work early, headed home and relaxed, cleaned up the leftovers from the week’s cooking, did some cleaning up around the house and played some City of Heroes, it really wasn’t pleasant outside to do much else and I’m fine with that. Saturday I met up with Rhodes and we “did” the city, starting at the now-open Portrait Gallery and Chinatown and Starbucks and downtown and Dupont and Polo India Club and 17th St and U St and Sparky’s and eventually I walked home and just about collapsed. I’m enjoying getting in more walking, but sometimes in this heat? Ouch.

My new City of Heroes “rule” is one level per character per night. It allows me to play a wider number of characters and generally level them up at around the same speed. Plus the LJ COH Community started new supergroups on the hero and villain sides that have encouraged me to actually play more than one character at a time instead of my previous method of working one up to 50 then starting on the next. It’s fun, but lately sitting at the computer all evening isn’t ranking quite as highly as it used to.

I was having more fun playing with AudioFaucet, a TiVo HME application that allows me much more control over my iTunes music from the TiVo than their own bundled interface. TiVo does allow you to play your computer’s music through the entertainment system, but it’s limited for PCs as far as seeing individual albums and playlists, etc. This app lets you access all of that, in a really nice on-screen interface, gives you nice display options for the album art, and if there’s no art for the current song, it goes and finds it. Plus, you can rate your songs through the TiVo thumbs up/down and it updates the play count in your iTunes library. The only thing that could make it better is last.fm/audioscrobbler access, but nothing’s perfect.. yet. Oh yeah, and it’s FREE. Though considering it’s an TiVo-award winning application, I’m sure that after enough tweaks and improvements, they’ll start charging for it — I have noticed a few hitches and it did crash once or twice, but my music library is a little bit massive and it’s hosted on my own machine, so those factors might have had something to do with it.

Sunday morning I had brunch at the local place Tonic and took along my borrowed copy of Devil/Prada which the server asked me about and I told her to see the film since she loves Meryl Streep (but who doesn’t?) and it was an otherwise lovely meal aside from this one loud woman who, even though the place was empty aside from me and her party, decided she needed to fill the place with her voice. I can understand people being loud when the place is full, since you really can’t hear yourself, let alone anyone eating with you, but there was no excuse for her. It sort of set me on a misanthropic bent for the day, but I did get plenty of time to myself at home to watch cooking shows and play some more games and read a bit, so I was good for a while.

In the evening, Everett and I met up for a meal at Busboys and Poets. I’d only been there one time and it wasn’t a pleasant experience, but the food wasn’t horrible and the place has a nice laidback feel to it. The only problem with this is that, for the most part, DC isn’t really a laidback town. For seating they offer real tables along with plush chairs and couches and it attempts a sort of bohemian vibe, but the people who come there are very faux-bohemian. Still, the eating experience was good, though the waiter got my order wrong and it took a while to get him back to our table to correct it and then a while longer to get the re-order, so by then Ev was pretty much done with his meal, but we had a good conversation and they did have one very good cocktail called DC Tap Water (vodka, peach schnapps, black razz, blue curacao, pineapple juice) that reminded me of the Black Lemonade (recipe still unknown) I had a Hamburger Mary’s in San Diego, however unlike that experience, my subsequent toilet visits were not plagued with an excess of blue.

After dinner we went in search of dessert and coffee and found it on 17th St. Again, great conversation and general bullshit and blatherscyte, though I have decided that I am really over laptops in cafes. When mobile computers were new and finally small enough to actually use in public, it was cool, people took them out, did a few things, maybe a little business or paper writing and had their coffee/food and were on their way. Now these machines are often behemoths (even some macs) and people have to bring their power cords/blocks/cables and hunt for an outlet, and move around to find a signal. It is nowhere near as funny as this clip from G4. And I suppose what I miss about coffee shops is that maybe you were reading the paper or a book, but you were still open to being somewhat social with the people around you. With a laptop in front of you, you’re really just trying to bring the privacy that you’d normally have in the house or the office, to a public place. So you’ve left your home specifically to NOT interact with people, especially when you put headphones on. And while I think “Internet Cafes” are someplace you’d expect that, I don’t really think that coffee houses and restaurants that offer free wifi are expecting the same thing. Ok, my curmudgeon rant for the day is over now. Maybe next time I’ll go into my online name and where it comes from. 🙂