Friday night James came to town for the opening night of our weekend debauchery. Jen and I had been planning simply to do laundry. How wrong we were. Once James was on his way, we decided to stop by our local Andronico’s to buy some food for the weekend. There, we ran into some fellow Vassar alums (Agatha, Jessica, and Dennis). We didn’t know any of them too well, but Agatha and I worked on the Misc. together, and Jessica and I had an English class together way back when. They recognized me first, then they were immediately familiar to me. Small world. Cool to see fellow alums in the hood.
Back at the ranch with Jen and Enoch, I tapped the Grolsch 5-liter mini-keg to start the night off right. Ben and Jess came to join in the fun, and James eventually showed up. We hung out at the pad, drinking and chatting most of the night. We watched Bill Maher. The ladies played some cards. Shortly after busting out the ceremonial Manischewitz concord grape and new-to-us blackberry wine, James, Enoch, and I took the latter on the road and headed to to Milano’s for a midnight pizza. James and Milano himself chatted it up for a while. We had nearly kicked our bottle of blackberry by the time we returned home. The festivities continued until 4am that night. Party on.
Saturday we slept in until close to noon before waking up to ready ourselves for the 1st Annual Potrero Hill Chili Cookoff. After getting stuck and super-frustrated in the rainy day traffic around the Metreon (I fought the urge to jump out of my car), we eventually made it to the shindig. We hung out there for a couple hours and I caught up with some old friends and Headlight coworkers. We then packed it in and headed to de casa of Ben and Jess, where we sipped some wine and played some Vice City for a few hours.
Saturday night we headed back to the Inner Sunset hood and walked to Ebisu to put our names in for sushi (R. Rodriguez for 6). Jen and I discovered last weekend when Dan was in town that the place right across the street, Hotei, is under the same ownership and management as Ebisu, which, of course, means all the same great sushi at all the same prices for a better ambience with less of a wait. So we put in our name and would eventually eat there. As the waiting began, James, Ben, Enoch, and I snuck off to Yancy’s around the corner on Irving St. where we pounded a round of Guiness and Bass. The look on Enoch’s face was classic as he turned around with 3/4 of his Guiness remaining to find James, Ben, and me standing with our pint glasses empty mere seconds after ordering the round. The bartendress poked fun at us and some other older guys at the bar when she caught us all staring wide-eyed at Bring It On, the movie about high school cheerleaders that’s better than you might expect, on the bar TV.
We headed back to Hotei, where Jen and Jess stood in wait and tried not to get too mad at their respective men (Ben and I were lucky). So Ben and I took them back to Yancy’s for another round of drinks and Ms. Pac-Man while James and Enoch held down our place in line.
The sushi was delicious. We had a lot of fun.
We finished off the night by watching last week’s episode of Six Feet Under to get psyched for tonight’s episode.
Today has been a fittingly lazy day. Jen is off at her new book club in the Haight with Ben, and Enoch (who’s been staying with us for a couple weeks due to roommate complications) and I are kickin’ it at home with the pups. I got my email inbox down to about 15 messages and tweaked the back-end of my site’s home page to make it even more dynamic and flexible (rather than all the content on the page existing in one database record, the teaser or block for each section of my site now exists in a separate record and is assigned an ordinal — so that I can easily play around with the order (sort by date added, ordinal, title, etc.) without futzing around with the HTML content itself). Cool stuff, I think. The only disappointing part about today is that this super-fun weekend will soon come to an end and it’s back to work tomorrow.
