Week of 20JUN11

So, boring weekends mean exciting weeks it seems; thus, I'll post up 
some excitement from the week.  These're just the evenings, since I'm 
still spending my days at your standard-issue 9-5 consulting position.

Monday -
One of my free days, but since I spent the whole weekend (effectively) 
playing video games, I decided against doing any real gaming until 
Thursday.  After I got home Monday I quickly heated up some leftovers 
from the weekend and grabbed my climbing kit, jumping in the car to 
head out to Hammond.

At Hammond Pond I spent a good hour and a half or so doing traverses at 
the main wall, hanging out with the random folks who had congregated 
there.  There was a pair from MIT's outdoors club who were running trad 
lines up the rock; I was lucky enough to see one of them do his first 
actual trad climb... he did well, though I did notice a few "it could 
have been better" placements.  Another group was from Norway on 
vacation in the states, and they were running trad lines as well, but 
with a threesome group instead of a pair like the MIT kids.  Three 
climbers is nice though, since I saw the third partner always around 
taking cool pictures of the two climbers.  The last group... 

The last group was a trio of hipsters; one "awesomely rad climber" and 
two "total outdoors kids".  AKA, one guy who ripped his shirt off 
immediately and then climbed worse than a newborn, one scrawny skater 
boy, and one cubby "too cool" girl.  Shirtless-McGee set up their gear, 
and I had the unfortunate luck of seeing his anchor; he had simply 
wrapped a length of webbing around a tree.  No knots, nothing securing 
it to the tree besides friction.  It didn't even have both sides tied 
to the climbing rope, one was just loose, waiting to slip out and drop 
the climber.  Nothing was redundant, of course, and the single 
carabiner was braced bent over the edge of the rock, in the "holy shit 
worst-case-ever" position.

I mentioned all of this, the Norwegians mentioned it, and the MIT guys 
commented on the hipsters "completely assenine" method of belaying, 
using the belay device set upside-down and backwards. and the hipsters sighed 
and called us mainstream.  Fucking idiots.

After a bit I headed over to the bouldering area (called the 
ampetheater) and burt my arms out, and then headed home to play a few 
games of Starcraft with my dad.  We weren't able to actually get the 
game working though so I sat back, poured some brandy and put on music, 
and relaxed the rest of the night away.


Tuesday - 

Tonight was date-night with Allison, so we met up outside my office 
right around 1700 to head over to dinner before catching a movie.  
Yep... dinner and a movie, TOTALLY a unique date idea.  I was 
brain-melted, leave me alone.

The evening started off with a bit of technical difficulties, since the 
movie we were heading to see (Sondheim's "Company") was sold out, and 
thus we weren't sure what to do.  Allison's indecisiveness / willingness 
to please wasn't helping, since she was "up for anything you want to 
do", but sort of hinting that she would be quite cross if we went to 
see a superhero movie.  So we finally decided on heading out to see 
"Super-8" after going to dinner at Cambridge Brewing Company.

CBC is an amazing brewery right near where I work, and they have some 
of the best french fries I've had in Boston / Cambridge.  We ate, 
drank, and made merry while chatting about pretty much anything and 
everything before finishing up and heading over to the theater.  I 
biked while Allison took the T, and she actually arrived before me, 
thanks to my getting distracted by phone calls and talking to a 
security guard at Biogen.  When I did arrive, I found out that Super-8 
was sold out as well, so after a bit of deliberations we decided on 
"Pirates 4" instead.

Pirates was a quite good movie, even though the 3D was a bit poorly 
done, in my opinion.  Nothing would've been lost if it was only 2D, 
the third dimension was kinda bleh.  The biggest part of it, in my mind, 
was the revelation that Jack was unwilling to become immortal at the 
cost of anyone else, and that the mermaids were SMOKING hot.  Like... 
holy shit hot.  Hotter than the sun, I'm just really impressed that 
they were able to make those women as perfect as they were, especially 
their voices.  Yeah, I'm not just completely shallow and physical, a 
girls voice can be a huge turn-on too :P

After the movie we headed back to my place; I arrived a good bit 
earlier than Allison, and so played a quick game of StarCraft II with 
my dad, since the previous nights game had failed.  the game was 
actually quite good, and we were able to smoke the computer pretty 
quickly, and my dad was able to be the main pusher this time, instead 
of me leading the charge.  After the game, Allison and I e hung out, 
relaxed, played, and headed to bed a bit after midnight.


Wednesday -

Today is Wednesday, AKA "Wop Wednesday", AKA "Italian Night!".  I got 
home early and immediately got in the car and headed to Stop and Shop 
to help Allison and T do some food shopping.  We picked up everything 
we needed, and ventured out into the rain to bring it home and start 
cooking.  When Allison and I got home my friend Erin was already there 
(was a funny story; she lives in Cali but had come out on business just 
for the two days around today.  She called me yesterday asking if 
anything fun was happening, and thus here she was).  T and Maureen 
arrived rediculously late, especially since we had left the store 
around the same time, but once they were here we started cooking in 
earnest, even though the dinner ended up being just the six of us; T, 
Maureen, Allison, Erin, Mike and Myself.

We ate and made merry, cooking up Mozzarella sticks and garelic for 
appetizers and Shrimp Scampi and Chicken Parm for the main meal.  We 
had planned on special cookies for dessert, but unfortunately the 
person tasked with bringing them along had gotten sick and wasn't able 
to make it.  Dinner was excellent either way though, and we all had a 
lot of fun hanging out and relaxing, though Erin did dominate the 
conversation (per the usual / expected, hehe).  After we cleaned up 
everyone headed home, Allison and I polished off the remainder of the 
wine, showered, and headed to bed.  


Thursday -

My one relax day; the evening started with a company party and ended 
with a rediculously late evening.  The company party was for one of the 
main product lines reaching its 1 millionth use and its 5 year 
anniversary within the same month.  I enjoyed it primarily due to the 
good, free food, and the fact that I was able to finally meet some of 
the new interns that I hadn't met before.  Lots of cool people my age 
work here, but most of them are the 3 or 6 month interns, so I don't 
get a chance to meet them most of the time.  We chatted, drank champagne 
and beer, and made a rather good night of it until I headed out around 
1830.

After I got home, I spent the night relaxing and playing games; I 
started by watching a few episodes of a new series I'd found on 
Allison's netflix called HALO: Legends.  It's a series expanding on the 
HALO universe in a rather cool way, though some of the stories were 
rather strange for what the universe generally is.  Mostly due to the 
fact that they all stuck very strongly to the "standard-issue" anime 
tropes, such as the "too cool" soldiers, and the "super powered guys 
need to gather energy before punching someone" thing.  Strange.  But 
afterwards I switched over to the Witcher, rocked out, and went to bed 
around 0200.