Christmas has come and gone. It was a good day. Jodi and I made a deal to cap our gifts to each other at $150 and suprisingly we were both happy with what we got. As you might imagine Ace was pretty bonkers all day. We didn't buy him all that much stuff but he madeout anyway. As usual we spent the early part of the day here in Brooklyn. Jodi and Ace & I opened our gifts and then my mom & bro came over. I made a frittata and we had a nice little breakfast. I did well in the cycling clothes department which is key for the cold months. Have put some of the weight I lost back on since it got cold and I want to get back on the bike. Now I have no excuses! Who am I kidding. I have excuses for everything.
Then we headed over to the Bronx to party it up with the Fernandez clan over there. It was pretty typical. Dinner was classically late. We arrived kind of tardy and no one was even close to ready for the fun to begin. People were still desperately wrapping presents up until the last possible moment.
At the bronx xmas we do a not so secret santa thing. I keep getting people in my own family. I got my brother mike and I was really trying to figure out what he wanted since he hadn't been forthcoming with what he wanted. In the end I got him some pajamas and then I had
these awesome coasters made. He liked it all. I was pleased.
Cousin Rick had me and he bought me a bunch of biking gear and the DVD of the film Bachelor Party (starring a future oscar winner TOM HANKS!). I love that movie. It's pretty fucking funny.
The dinner started classically late in the Bronx and we finally mde our way home at around 9pm It was a VERY full day. Even more tiring was the fact that we knew we had to catch a flight to Milwaukee the next day at 11am. So we came home, tossed all our booty on the floor and packed and slept.
Milwaukee was crazy. We landed and promptly went to the
Organ Piper which is a amazing pizza place that features a live guy masterfully playing the
organ. The pizza is decent, the beer is nice and the organ music is fucking fantastic. almist as entertaining as the music is just how children get totally turned on by this music and how incredibly stiff the organ guys is. He's a young guy who is an organ master but he must be going insane after his 10,000th request of the chicken dance or edelweiss.
After that we put ace down and headed out to an engagement party for our friend Mike. It was in the basement of his superduper duplex that he bought with his brother. I guess he's done a ton of work on it and it shows. It was a jaw dropper how cool he'd made it inside. Just damn pretty. The party itself was totally bizarre. It featured so many people I haven't seen in anywhere from 5-10 years that I felt locked in a timewarp. I got to reconnect with a bunch of freaks from my past so it was a fun time. Most odd was seeing Eva Treiffiessen who I hadn't even thought about since I randomly gave her a ride to her job a few months before I moved from Milwaukee to New York. She looks exactly the same. I didn't really talk to her too much but she apparently she was married at one point, was walking with a cane due to some major hip issues and all manner of issues. Other people at the party were Chris Robles, Mark Cherek, Barb & Dave Schnieder, DJ Brooks, Dan Vernon & his bride, Nate & Shacey Gubin and a few other people whose names elude me. It was a fun time.
The next day we did Xmas with Jodi's family. It was just the grandparents and the siblings so it was a mellow time. The kids totally made out as usual. Ace scored HUGE with a fisher-price shopping cart and all these pieces of fake fruit and bread and stuff for the shopping cart. I will post pictures to truely show the magnificence of this thing.
Milwaukee bars still allow smoking. If you ever want to figure out why smoking was banned then smell youd clothes after a night of drinking in Milwaukee bars. Holy stench.
There has been a veritable explosin of bars in Milwaukee. Everytime we go there a new crop of bars have sprung forth.
This time we visited
The Palm Bar which had a really cool regular bar and then where there should have been a mirror there was a hole in the wall revealing a second stack of boozxe bottles and a million different types of beer. The actual bar looked like it had been there a million years and was crazy dark. A great dive.
The 2nd bar we went to was The
Comet. Comet used to be a coffee joint. There was a chinese place that had been there forever next to it. I should have frequented that chinese place more when I lived in milwaukee since it was one of the only non-revolting chinese restaurants I have encountered there. So taht chinese place went under and Comet expanded into it and now sevres a whole diner-y menu and turned into a bar at night. It was beard night when we went there which meant you got some kind of discount on some shitty beer if you look like a bearded asshole. I am just bitter because I only had stubble. Anyway, it was a different vibe but still not one I was particularly enjoying.
The final bar we went to was called
The Wicked Hop and has a much more modern and boring feel. I can't really say much about it other than it was a nice bar in the third ward. Nothing very exciting. I did notice that when I left they had the same bland rock playing out speakers in the awning outside. I hope thats just left over from the summer when they have outdoor seating. Otherwise it's just outside noise and boring outside music at that.
On top of this the east side of city seems to be going through this interesting reclaimation of land from the previous 50 years of highway dominant thinking. They have knocked down all these highway overpasses that used to be odd and underused ways to get to the east side from the highway. At first I thought it was crazy but now I think that they just clearing the land for even more condos. It makes sense but we'll see how long it takes to happen.
Finally we took our plane home tonight. It was a pretty uneventful flight. Midwest Express. Free cookies. The usual. The final 45 minutes of the flight were through what can only be catagorized as "Pea Soup" fog. it was the same grey nothing out the window forever. The landing was exciting in that it was one of those plane-listing-to-the-side-hard-bounce-and-insanely-fierce-breaking landings. We got off the plane and the line for a cab was about 80 people long. We've learned that there are more than one place to catch a cab. We walked about 300 feet to the next cab stand and caught one in about 4 minutes. Ridiculous.
Finally I received "Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood" the video game for xmas. It's pretty fucking hard and very much like Full Spectrum Warrior in that it's all whole lot of surpression fire and then out flanking the enemy to kill'em. Pretty damn hard I say.
I am going to publish this now because I stayed up WAY too late writing it and it it's WAY too long.
