My friend Sean won first place in the Otakon costume contest. Congrats! You can see a picture of his & his friend Neil's costumes on the front page of Darkbolt - an online manga he's been writing for several years now. They look very cool.

Thanks to Farrah (one of my co-workers), I now have pictures of mein heir. Here's one shot & here's another.

Also, since I had the camera, I figured I'd take a few shots of the now not-so-new place: Kitchen, Dining + Lounging Area, Living Room and (especially for you Mike) a shot of my clawfoot tub.

As already stated on scrabble, I'm making a mix cd to send out to friends & acquaintances because I feel like doing so after a long period of mix inactivity. After several hours of musique vetting & arranging last night, the CD's - two to be precise - are complete. For those of you interested, send your mailing addresses my way, and I'll try to get them out sometime this week.

Also, while compiling music for this collection, I finally used the daft CLuB card included with my Discovery CD. daft CLuB is such a neat concept because they have a bunch of exclusive remixes & live tracks in MP3 format that you can only download if you enter the 16 digit # on the card. It's always great when bands make an extra effort to do something cool for the fans.

N-E pointed True Porn Clerk Stories out to me. The name is pretty much sums it up: it's a number of journal entries about the experiences of a clerk in a Porn Video store. Very interesting & well-written along with that It disturbs me, yet I cannot look away vibe that the subject material brings. Unsurprisingly, it's merited a mention on NPR.

Highly recommended if the topic doesn't offend you.

Saw Austin Powers in Goldmember earlier this evening. Have to say that it was exactly what I expected: overall very funny, but continuing the downward spiral that most franchises seem to fall into. Like MIB2, Goldmember falls into the unfortunate habit of spoofing itself. Thankfully, the amusement factor is high enough to overcome the "there to frame the jokes" plot and the prop other characters (the title character & Foxy Cleopatra). And I have to agree that the opening sequence is hysterical.

Prior to the move, Brian, his wife Karen & I stopped by Grapevine Wines for their Friday wine tasting open house. $4 to sample 20 odd wines is not a bad deal. I found a few nice wines that'll make an excellent belated Father's Day present (I hope!).

Speaking of gifts and wine, I finally got Brian a belated, not so secret birthday present: a compressed air wine opener. My sister first showed me one of these things a year or so ago - it's very cool to see the cork pop-up semi-magically with no twisting & drilling. I hope Brian likes it.

Bobo has joined our little MoveableType clique! For those of you unaware of exactly who Bobo is, Bobo was a member of Harvey. We also happened to room together for a while before economic factors drove us apart, and he fled to Texas.

Stop by his blog & say hi!

Tonight's very tasty dish was Fried Chicken w/Garlic Aioli. Up until today, I never thought that garlic could be spicy; I stand corrected. The garlic aioli (which really isn't aioli considering the botched job I did) had plenty of "Whoa" power. Asides from the mayo that wasn't, it was quite an excellent meal: the aioli added a nice kick to the already bulbous vegetable marinated fried chicken.

Addendum:
I feel garlic-ey this morning even after brushing my teeth & listerine. I can still taste it on my tongue. I guess there was a lot of garlic in that recipe.

I was greeted this morning with "Welcome, Spam!" on the opening page of my Yahoo mail account. It's always good to have that confirmed first thing in the morning.

I just got back from the Wilco show at the Pageant. Let me just say that they put on an amazingly good show. The music was wonderful, jam filled versions. Jeff Tweedy (the lead singer) was very entertaining with his banter ("That last song was snoozin. You know how bad was the new good? I'm trying to do the same thing with snoozin."). The band played for two hours, and the crowd was utterly in thrall. I have to admit that I was amazed that there was such a turn out here (St. Louis) of all places.

Moral of the story: If you have the chance to see them in concert, do it.

St. Louis seems to have settled into the traditional nasty Midwestern summer: high 90's and loads of humidity. The walkway between Forest Park and the science center has had the orange "no, you really shouldn't be outside right now" air quality sign up for several days now. Additionally, it seems the A/C has problems cooling my place down to anything below 82 even though I have ceiling fans engaged.

Given all this, I don't feel the slightest bit guilty eating half the fruit bars the day I bought them.

I tried making a sauteed steak today. Unfortunately, I don't think there was enough left over beef junk to properly make sauce portion of the dish. However, you can always cover that up with fancy ingredients like madeira, shallots & crushed green peppercorns.

FYI, this is the second recipe I've made out of The Essentials of Cooking. My goal is to try every single technique in the book at least once.

Wish me luck.

Or not really. I played 9 holes of golf at the Triple 'A' Club (not be confused with AAA Motor Club) in Forest Park with Brian today. Besides the pain of having the play in extreme heat, it was rather fun. I really have no skill at golf, but I actually legitimately got par on the last hole. Yay.

I'm currently very sendentary due to lack of fluids...someone please water me so I don't die of thirst.

Yesterday, I had my hair dyed for the first time. There are now nice red-violet highlights throughout the top. I'll see if I can get a picture up sometime for those curious how it turned out.

I just finished cooking and eating Salmon en papillote. What an amazing dish! It's sooo food of the gods level good, yet so simple to make. I think it's just become my favorite dish.

What is en papillote? en papillote is the fine French technique of combining a fillet, a sprinkling of some liquid (usually wine), herb butter and sometimes vegetables in a parchment paper/alumninum foil envelope which is sealed and then baked.

In my case, I used salmon, julienne green onions, sweet rice vinegar and taragon butter. Not exactly an orthodox combo, but wonderful nonetheless.

I highly recommend trying it out.

Mark pointed out that as of my last entry, I had caught up with Mike Lee in total # of entries to my blog.

With this one, I surge past him by an astounding one.

Hoo-ha.

So...anyone have any suggestions for a new hairstyle for me?

I'm getting a haircut tomorrow. A real salon haircut, not a chain type affair. Along with this haircut, I'm going to get some dark red streaks in my hair. Unfortunately, I have no idea what sort of haircut to get, let alone what would go well with such a color pattern. I'm leaning towards a longer style than I currently have (pretty short, with comb-forward bangs that go slightly up in front), but I dunno how much or in what direction.

First, the answers to some questions posed in regards to my last entry:

1) No, I did not have the FatKreme combo (thank gawd). For the uninitiated, the FatKreme combo is a Fatburger with the bun replaced by two Krispy Kreme donuts. The FatKreme combo, as some might have guessed, is the brainchild of a certain Jet. Yes kids, he is insane for even thinking of such a monstrosity of cardio-attack inducing glutton.

2) For those of you who I've fallen out of touch with (Hi Jen!) or just didn't know me until you stumbled upon this blog, I'm currently living in St. Louis. I was an economic refugee and didn't have that much of a choice. I'm currently working for a reinsurance company's IT department...not the sexxiest of work, but it pays. St. Louis itself isn't bad, but tis a bit too sleepy for me.

And without further ado, my continuing adventures in Seattle:

The city itself wasn't what I expected. N-E described it quite correctly when he said "the city rises from the forest and the coast"(?) rather than the other way around. There are trees and water everwhere, giving good portions of Seattle a very European river city vibe. It's also a lot hillier than I expected.

As pointed out in other blog entries, I really didn't get to see many of Seattle's unique features. All of the involved parties were rather lethargic for a variety of reasons. Additionally, 26 hours isn't exactly the largest amount of time to be touristy. Guess those things will have to wait until next time.

Additionally, I saw meklar for the first time since college. I suppose it was inevitable since he lives in N-E's basement in Seattle. (= He, along with Jeremy, joined us for the movie night that included Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a very audience participatory version of Face/Off (just imagine a bunch of people sitting around doing arm motions while saying "I want to take his face...off."), and 20% of Magnolia.

All in all, it was a very fun, but way too short hang-out trip. Mucho gracias to Brian, who not only posted comments in my blog, but also provided the MMMM...FREE TICKET for the trip.

Jet is quite correct in mentioning that I misspelled Grunk's last name. Sorry Brian!

Mike is also quite correct that a true correction would've changed it to meklar.

I'm so fond of re-writing history.

Gawd.

I really dunno if I want to do another weekend trip. Especially one that involves Southwest Airlines. I was originally slated to arrive in Seattle at 8:40 pm Pac time. I ended up arriving close to 1 am local time there after having switched from a 2 legged flight to 3 legged flight. This 3 legged flight also included a mad dash in KC where I barely made it onto my connecting flight to Sacramento.

Needless to say, I was really glad to see N-E and DeLish waiting for me at the airport after that hellish tour of America's finest secondary airports. It had been years since I'd hung out with either of them so I wasn't quite sure what to expect.

Since I'm tired, I think I'll just give the highlights version of what we did:
*24 hour Italian (actually pretty good)
*Fatburger
*Krispy Kremes at 10 or so at night.
*Used CD shopping (Bad Mike Bad!)
*Waaaay too many movies. Including The Specials, a very bad movie that has it's moments.
*McDonald's - Why is it I always end up going there against my free will when I'm on trips?

Extended version forthcoming.

N-E set me up. It wasn't me.

Please don't expect anything insightful.

And please don't feed this blog.