UMTravels

11-30 update.

Well, the answer is not really, beyond posting a subject line. Will look for an Amazon Kindle WordPress App for that. Meantime, here is the picture I wanted to post of Swanda, the inflatable polar bear, and I:

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The answer? With 85+ wines to taste in a two-hour period, swirl, sip and spit. Well, spit anything that is under $50 a bottle wholesale. That left swallowing for about 25 of the selections.

How about this bottle at $90 retail:

That would be the 2009 Chateauneuf-du-Pape Rouge. Yummy, but out of my price range. Nothing at the tasting was under $21 a bottle wholesale. Yikes.

A little stop at the ReStore right around the corner from the tasting. Found a 24″ four burner gas range ($115) and a char-broil grill, also 24″ ($175), unfortunately NO place to put them so I passed along the information to MoonSong who will swing by and take a look at them. When we both know a store repair guy it helps. Those are stunning cheap prices for commercial equipment.

Next stop was Pike Place Market to drop Jim off for a quick bus home, then onto the re-routed Highway 99 which was only a crawl for the first ½ mile then it opened up (as opposed to if I’d gotten on at Western Ave.)

The evening was spent like the morning, waiting for the Alaska Airlines servers to catch up with the massive load when they advertised a CyberMonday sale. Luckily it runs for 5 days. Booked Boston at $125 + tax each way, changed the Kansas City trip in March to the week before so I can see the opera Nixon in China. Here is Helene’s take on the opera.

Great plan Markie — “Nixon in China” is a great opera, and they’ve got a stellar cast.

James Maddelena created the role for John Adams, director Peter Sellars, and librettist Alice Goodman.  His voice was a bit ragged as the performance went on at the Met last year, but not horrible, and dramatically, he’s got it down pat.  Maria Kanyova sang Pat Nixon at Canadian Opera Company’s recent production, and a friend from Toronto thought she was great.  Richard Paul Fink is a fantastic Henry Kissinger: he was in the Met production, too.

I know the story, but haven’t seen it live. The fact that I get to see it in the new Kauffman Center For The Performing Arts is the gravy on top of the potatoes not that I’m allowed potatoes anymore if I want to continue to lose weight.

Bagged Oakland at $101.40 (total) round-trip for late January, and looked into New York (well, Newark) at $100 each way plus tax. Maybe Houston to visit a friend, that’s only $75 + tax.

No matter, with everything I’ve booked I’ll be at 15,000 flight miles by the end of April. Really, one more New York, Boston or Hawaii would give me MVP for next year. Don’t think I’ll go for Gold as they’ve changed one of the biggest reasons for Gold — the 4 upgrade anytime (assuming availability) so that it doesn’t count for the cheapest fares, and you all know how cheap I am.

Wonder what tomorrow brings other than work.

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Full day in the shop today. A full quiet day. Less than Turkey day which was only four open hours, and less than the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

Oh well, got power run for a small space heater near the cash wrap and am down to like nine wine cards left to input. I see Tuesday as making these happen, and maybe I’ll even get a drawer installed under the counter to help clear off the mess.

And what is my most referred to document today?

Yes, that would be the list of alternate characters for Windows. Can you say lots of French wines to make wine cards.

The plan for the drawers is to make them from wooden wine boxes on drawer pulls. How cook will that be. Hopefully there will be time tomorrow for that project. No time left today after tinkering with trying to get both the Skype and the MagicJack lines running on the KSU unit. Right now it’s Skype in the office and MajicJack in the living room but I want both on both as they say.

And there is a new version of the MajicJack out — the MajicJack Plus which doesn’t even require a computer — works much like the Skype box under the desk. Plug it into the wall, plug Ethernet into it, do a little configuration work, and poof, a faux land line.

More silly projects to keep me amused.

Sort of an odd dinner tonight, chicken thighs baked in a saffron créme masala sauce with a side of angel hair pear gorgonzola slaw.

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Just in time for the Champagne Season, Madrona Wine Merchants the announcement of their new temperature controlled wine cooler. Stop in for that cold bottle of bubbly, or even a white wine or two.

That was the post on the Facebook Page (hey, by the way, come like us http://www.facebook.com/madronawinemerchants). The cooler can hold more bottles, but you wouldn’t be able to see the labels easily.

Left the shop at 4:30pm and headed to Swanda’s to taste possible appetizers for a White Elephant party he is having in early January. My favorite was the mini-Beef Wellington, though it could use a little dab of crème fresh with some finely grated fresh horseradish to liven it up a bit. The artichoke bottom appetizer suffered from WAY to much dried tarragon, the meatballs were good, but gave me a little gas as they tend to do (something about meatballs, meatloaf ¯ even without any tomato products in them), and of course, Swanda’s deviled eggs were the hit once again.

Sort of didn’t need dinner after that, which might explain why I had a stuffed chicken breast and some cole slaw at 10pm.

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Goal for today: toilet paper

Odd things that showed up in the mail today.

Item 1: A check for $59.56, which is $41.44 less than the transfer fee for

Item 2: The deed to a floating week timeshare in Cabo San Lucas.

The check… a class-action settlement from half a dozen years ago having to do with foreign transaction fees on foreign charges. Well, after a little research (maybe there is a reason for this blog) the answer is four years. Check out this old blog entry:

http://blog.unclemarkie.com/2007/12/15/yikes-ten-years-of-overseas-travel/

As for the timeshare, a present from two dear friends of mine. Seems the timeshare is right on the beach in downtown Cabo San Lucas and a little noisy for them.

Starting to play with the Kindle Fire that came a week or so ago… starting to figure out ways to use it:

Wow, the new Amazon Fire masquerading as an “old-school” alarm clock… and the screen is so shiny you can see me photographing. I also install solitaire and downloaded some freebie books. Got music on it yesterday, but still having a problem with getting some of my videos to play. And I can’t seem to load this .mobi file that one of the Colonels sent me.

So far, if it works out, the best will be the exchange client for the Amazon Fire — means that I’ll have my contacts, calendar, and synchronized email on my Fire. THAT would/will be sweet.

Dinner tonight was with Jeff and Marvin… a stunning cassoulet (a French bean, rabbit, duck, and sausage stew) with a salad and a home-made almond crust chocolate cheesecake. Damn, more carbs, and I even didn’t have the bread!

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It’s our first Thanksgiving in business, so what they hell, let’s open for four hours on Thanksgiving.

Actually, business wasn’t bad — booked for revenue than on Tuesday when I worked and we were open for eight hours.

After work, headed off to Thanksgiving Number Two at Swanda’sâ… Some assembly required:

Nothing says the holidays like assembling flat-pack furniture. A new storage rack for the closet, and a new TV stand. Sorry about the lighting, but the overhead fixtures in the apartment suck (luckily the reading lights are good).

And onto the feast…

How autumnal. Prosecco with the deviled eggs, white wine with the squash soup, and a love 2005 Bonny Doon le Cigare Volant with the main courses. DancingBear made it in time for the last glass of the red, and we were both out of there by 9, which might be considered a miracle.

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The morning was spent redoing all the bookings for the WorldMark Santa Fe for the second week of December. Why use points when it’s available cheap at the last minute.

And then came the panic.

The call from an unknown cell phone number with an area code I didn’t recognize — turned out it was Jim calling from the shop where we had internet service, but no phone line. Panic. No phone line on the day before Thanksgiving — one of the big wine shopping days of the year. Yikes.

Trip number one to the store: On the phone to Qwest. They confirmed no dial-tone. Escalation to the switching office. Right, no dial tone. Escalation to the programmer. Yes, the phone is programmed correctly, but it doesn’t have a dial tone. I head back home to put up my MajicJack — which is a VOIP (voice over internet protocol) device since we have internet service. Add a stop for ribs at the BBQ place on Cherry where a ½ pound of pork ribs is $7.50 and I swear it weighs in at over a pound. Several more calls from CenturyLink while I was driving home.

Trip number two was interrupted 2/3rds of the way back by…  a call from the shop (Madrona Wine Merchants came up on caller ID). The phone is working. Jim got a call from CenturyLink and the rep said, “Well, it’s working again, and I have no idea why, but we’ve cancelled the service call for Friday.”

Needless to say I installed the MajicJack and trained Jim on it just in case. The thought of not being able to run credit cards for three days was unnerving. Maybe we should get one of those wireless merchant machines.

Done with the panic I went home and tried to relax. Should have had a nap, but it didn’t happen. Instead are started worrying about the Hawaii trip at the end of March to the south end of the Big Island. At the summer gathering I bought 3 nights in a three-bedroom three-bath house a couple of blocks from a clothing-optional black sand beach. The plan is to split the place ($350 for the three nights split three ways, and an extra $150 [again split] for an extra night) with Solus+ from Vancouver and DancingBear who has a boyfriend in Hilo, about 45 minutes away.

I’m feeling poverty stricken so the goal was to use as few as miles as possible while still flying First Class and not missing any days of work (since I’d like to actually take off the Breitenbush weekend in February). I was successful, but boy to I have an odd routing:

• Sunday, after working until 5pm, fly from Seattle to Oakland, arrive 10:30pm, have a night cap with Mark and Onyx
• Monday morning at 11am, fly from Oakland to Kona (direct on Alaska Airlines)
• Friday afternoon fly back to Oakland and have a night cap with Mark and Onyx
• Saturday morning at 9:30, fly to Seattle with enough time to show up at the 2-4pm tasting.

Whew!

Solus+ is now looking into arriving/leaving Kona the same dates using miles since he is going to the faerie gathering in Thailand at the end of January and is counting his pennies. It was made easier now that he doesn’t need to add a side trip to Maui onto the trip. Now I just have to get DancingBear on board since the dates we picked match when his boyfriend is out of nursing school on spring break. Hopefully that will happen tomorrow night when he meets up with Swanda and I for my Thanksgiving Number Two.

Nothing much to say about dinner other than a stir fry of ginger pork with a side salad. For once I missed rice.

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Today was my first 8+ hour workday in over 13 years. And no, I’m not expecting ANY sympathy, it’s been a good run.

What I realized as I was accepting deliveries, pricing and stocking, is that, “Wow, we generate a lot of cardboard.” Maybe I should have kept the Mommy Van instead of the MX-5.

Or maybe I just finally need to order the trunk rack so I can haul more boxes away at the end of a week:

Of course I didn’t get it at GoMiata as they want about $50 more for it. Got it from Moss Motors, but I couldn’t enlarge the shot on their site… now just imagine all those broken down boxes strapped to the rack. Surely this is a business expense.

Guess I need to put a few more bungee cords in the truck. Expect picture of the rack “in-use” once it arrives. Guess it’s like an early Christmas gift to the shop.

For part of the day Jim was at the shop with Missy, setting up our QuickBooks account. Didn’t get it done, so they are back at it on Friday… the day that the new wine fridge comes in. When I called to order it this morning, turns out they have a “scratch and dent” unit for $50 less sitting in their warehouse. Makes me feel bad for the wine rep that hauled his down the stairs of his house and over to our shop for us to borrow when we thought it was going to be 2-3 weeks.

Wasn’t expecting great sales on a Tuesday, but did better than I thought. Not enough to cover the “nut” of wages and rent, but at least I got a lot of the wine cards done.

It was a rainy day all around, so the nice juicy steak for dinner was a welcome home.

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The day was filled with a visit from Suze and Jim to work on artwork frames. Left them in the garage to lock up while I went shopping for a wine cooler for the shop. It is getting into the holidays and we really need something larger than the dorm fridge that I got from UW to hold our lunch and drinks.

Here is what I came up with, and it was cheaper locally, and deliver will be free. Downside is that it’s a 2-3 delivery time so we’ll have to borrow one of the reps glass front fridge in the meantime.

Holds 75 bottles and its $780. We got tired of waiting for Encore Restaurant Supply to track down just a regular glass front fridge to use. Might have been a little cheaper, but this will take less modification.

Made it back home in time to bake a little dill rye bread for dinner tonight. It should go nicely with the lamb chops, sautéed spinach and salad. It’s nice to have Missy over for dinner — even though she lives just down the block, our schedules rarely mesh.

Fun conversation after dinner, and plans for her to come to the shop tomorrow to set up our books using QuickBooks. She is a pro, and we need to convert from paper. We have only been trying to set this up since August. Her being in and out of chemo hasn’t helped, then there was my travel schedule.

Another late night.

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It must be a real job, it takes an alarm clock to get me up and running.

My work schedule on Sunday is 11-5pm. Normally Sunday’s are fairly light days, but as we head into the holiday season people are walking out the door with full and half cases of wine. So, number of people was down, but they were buying twice as much leaving me lots of down time to continue to work on the wine description cards. We are getting closer to at least having the vintage and pricing information on each of the wines. Still lots of them that need to be reprinted vertically, but guessing my Tuesday will be filled with that. Tuesday will be the first Tuesday we have been open, and we will continue to be open Tuesday through New Years and then re-evaluate whether it makes sense.

One of the last customers of the day was a fellow merchant on 34^th. Seems she comes in at the end of her shop day and picked up a bottle of white wine. Add the owner of the restaurant next door that picked up three bottles in the middle of the afternoon, and you have a lot of business support for our store. Gives me a hopeful feeling about the future.

I’ve started playing with my new Kindle Fire — but realized I need to get a cable to transfer my music to it since I don’t want to pay $20 a year for music storage in the cloud. You’d think that would come with Prime Membership — and maybe it does but I’ve been focused on other stuff at the moment.

Thanks Swanda for the folding cover — I’d planned on either sewing one or having Jen from Greenfire make me a drilled out book cover for it (may still do that!).

Locked up the shop a little after 5 and headed to Jim’s place for an early Thanksgiving — ten of us around the table, and at least that many different bottles of wine. Actually made it out of there at 9, but was in bed and lights out before the news was over —put under by the turkey.

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Saturday’s are my light work days in some respects, heavy in others.

Not that many hours (1:45 to sometime after 4), but with 4-5 bottles of wine open, lots of traffic both in front of the counter and behind. The routine we’ve gotten into is Jim works the floor, the wine rep pours and does the song and dance, and I run the register.

Generally I’d say about twice as busy as last Saturday — but the weather last Saturday truly sucked and today was at least dry and sunny (but cold).

And today’s silly gift:

Uncle Milton Ant Farm Revolution 1465 Living Ant Habitat w/LED – Projects Giant Ant Shadows on the Ceiling!

If you fee the need, you can click on the link above and it will take you to a purchase page. I’m not sure exactly why you would want to project giant ants on your ceiling, but who knows.

Swung by Swanda’s place on a mercy booze delivery, and helped him drink some of his. Then back home for a quiet dinner and a long phone call with Miss Missy, my neighbor who is suffering through round three (or is it four) of chemo. Not good, but we are having dinner on Monday night so at least she is eating.

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Lazy morning followed by “Owner Re-Education” — the things that I’ll do for $75 an hour. And they worked me over. First the novice (who really didn’t know shit), then the shark, then the branch manager — all trying go get me to buy more WorldMark points. It didn’t work. It did get me thinking about adding another 5,000 point at some point, probably after I sell (if and when I can) my current house.

Other than a stop at Safeway in Kelso (bought a ton of marked down meat there as well) it was a straight shot back to the city and some late afternoon errands:

• Pick up shirts at the cleaners
• Stop by the apartment for a ton of packages:
  Kindle Fire
  Hard disc enclosure to extract files from my mother’s old hard drive
  Toner cartridge for the shop printer
  4 bottles of wine from Bonny Doon
  4 plastic travel wine glasses

Had a couple of cocktails while we figured out the plans for Thanksgiving Dinner (McCormicks) and for the Cooking Class at Anitas on the 19^th where we are making Pimms Cups for the crowd. In case you don’t know what a Pimms Cup is:

Traditional Drinks Used: Pimm’s, the original No1 Cup, and Lemonade. Add three parts lemonade to one part Pimm’s No1 Cup (no weaker, ice is added and today Pimm’s is made and bottled with a much lower alcohol content than it was years ago — see the notes below).

Optional Drink Added: replace one-third of the lemonade with one-third ginger ale or ginger beer.

Serve In: High Ball Glass: A Tall Straight Glass.

Serve Chilled: Pimms must be served cold. Serve with ice cubes (not crushed ice).

The Garnish: Make sure that each drink has at least one of all the separate ingredients of mint and fruits added and poured in (depending on the recipe) and stirred — this is easy to do if making each glass singly, but harder to do if serving from a jug.

For a historical discussion, try here: http://historicalfoods.com/pimms-cocktail-recipe

Dragged myself home, made dinner, got files off one of the drives from the New Mexico trip, reformatted another one (still one to go), but oddly, didn’t have any time left to play with the Kindle.

Oh well. There is always tomorrow.

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Nice to sleep in for once, though the sounds of construction don’t make it easy.

By 10am I’ve picked up the BagBoy again to spend the day hanging out watching movies and other stuff, like a late breakfast and a late lunch.

By 5:30 he’s back home. I think we really have about 12 hours around each other before we are totally bored.

For today’s picture, we should title this “Uncle Markie in an XL rather than an XXL”:

Mind you, that was before it was washed the first time. Time will tell after the wash tonight.

Salad and a rolled skirt steak for dinner tonight.

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Well, Hugo finall showed up at 11:30 — I left him to finish up the rest of the insulation work in the attic.

Headed to Seaside today — ETA is to be checked in with the BagBoy by 4pm. Stopped in Olympia for gas and to hit the markdown meat rack — scored big time:

• Spiral cut ham half
• Couple of packs of lamb chops
• Bacon
• Bratwurst
• T-bone steak
• Rolled skirt steak with spinach and cheese
• Smoked ham hocks
• 2# of ground bison

And some salad stuff, but basically it was a meat run. Spent $75, saved $45. Not bad.

Actually manages to pick up the BagBoy, dealt with the front desk, signed up for “owner re-eduation” for $75 (more than I paid for the two nights) and we were in the room by four. Since he had dinner planned with his Uncle (no, not this Uncle) I had to get him back to the house by 7.

A funny thing happened on the way home. Backing out of the parking space, I heard this crunch, like running over a can. Didn’t think much about it — did the round-trip before realizing I couldn’t find my glasses. Retraced my steps and found this by my previous parking space.

Yes, that would be my reading glasses crushed by my car. I now have one lens left, and no back-up pair in the suitcase (rare).

Had a steak for dinner (should have fired up the grill), watched a little TV, and crashed early, tired from the drive.

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It’s official, I’m now MVP Gold on Alaska Airlines for next year:

Member Name: MARK STEPHEN SOUDER MVP Gold
Mileage Plan Number: XXXXXXXX
Available Miles: 183,118

Elite Tier Status Qualification

YTD Alaska Miles

Flown:   40,232          34,768 Miles to MVP Gold 75K

YTD Alaska/Qualifying Partner* Miles

Flown:   40,232       49,768 Miles to MVP Gold 75K

YTD Alaska/Qualifying Partner* Segments

Flown:   24           66 Segments to MVP Gold 75K

* Air France, American, Delta, KLM, and LanChile

Not going to make it to MVP Gold 75K unfortunately with only one little trip to Berkeley planned on Alaska for the rest of the year.

But back to the shoes. Headed to the dentist at 11am for the thrice-yearly cleaning. Stopped by UW surplus on the way back across the bridge — the printer I didn’t buy two weeks ago was no longer there. Once I saw it posted on their site I knew it was a goner. So I bought shoes instead:

Nothing like a couple of pair of subtle shoes. Converse had a 25% off on custom shoes today only that will arrive by Christmas.

Dinner with Dancing Bear and Swanda, and talk of what we are doing for Turkey Day which at the end of the meal of steaks, pasta, and ensalada caprese still wasn’t resolved. Worse coming to it I can go to the Faerie Potluck Thanksgiving.

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Early morning with Jameson in the house. Up at seven and he was out of the house fed and a lunch packed by eight. At least he let me sleep until seven and woke me with coffee.

Out to the shop at ten to make the pieces for the shelves in the bathroom at the shop and get them into the car:

Next up was to assemble the new lawnmower that showed up last week:

It’s pretty, it’s green, and this one actually catches the grass. Nice to assemble something that is so intuitive that you barely consult the direction, but still have no leftover pieces.

Hugo the insulation guy is running seriously late for his 11am appointment to fix the last couple of things. I gave him an hour and then left for the shop and errands.

Got the shortage shelf installed just in time for our first “private wine tasting” with Events and Adventures:

Gotta run, that’s it for today.

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Got to the shop around 10:30am just in case there was a problem after the power went out last night. Arrive to find:

1. We have power
2. The credit card machine “auto-settled” so there was a nice tape waiting for me
3. The cash register spit up its tape as well.

Got all the bookwork done and the doors open at 11am. Surprisingly Jim showed up in the early afternoon (even with a slight cold) to crank through a bunch of wine cards. For some reason I neglected to get a shot of how the racks are looking with the new vertical cards.

It was a good thing Jim did come is as mid-afternoon we had a “whale” come in talking about a case and a half of Christmas wine, and picking up several bottles of $25-50 a bottle wines to try.

Closed the doors as little after 5 and sprinted home to get ready for dinner with Jameson where we had our own little wine tasting:

The three open bottles were the dregs from the Saturday tasting, plus we opened a Chilean to go with the Italians.

Unfortunately Jameson’s visit is short — tomorrow it back to Olympia and the problem of his pump house for the rental property.

At least we had a good meal of lamb chops and spinach sautèed in bacon and vinegar.

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If it’s Saturday it must be shop duty.

Do the shopping up the hill, come home, vacuum seal some of the meat, get cleaned up and head to the store for a tasting of Wines from Southern Italy.

Here’s what we were tasting:

Saturday we’ll have open for tasting some great wines from Puglia, Sicily and Campania. Places known for their indigenous grapes unique to their specific locale. The emphasis is on the fruit, with such varietals as Falangina, Negroamaro, Nero d’ Avola, and Aglianico showing their stuff. Come see what they have to offer.

2009 Vinosia, Falanghina, Beneventano, Campania $12

100% Falangina —Vinosia is young winery, started in 2003, by Mario and Luciano Ercolino, whose family founded Feudi di San Gregorio where Mario was the head winemaker. Falanghina gets its name from the fact that due to its the vines are tied to poles called ‘falanga’ to contain its expansive growth. The Vinosia is a full-bodied white wine with lots of fruit notes of peach, pear and melon balanced by a fresh acidity.

2007 Cantele, Salice Salento Reserva, Puglia $12

85% Negroamaro, 15% Malvasia Nera — Cantele is a third generation, family run winery in the Salento region of Puglia specializing in local varietals. The Salice Salento Reserva is aged for 3 years in a mix of stainless tanks and oak barrels then rests in bottle 6 months before release. The wine is full bodied with lots of deep fruit flavors and notes of spice and bitter chocolate with a smooth and luscious finish.

2009 Feudo di Santa Tresa, Purato, Nero d’Avola, Sicily (Organic) $13

100% Nero d’Avola — The Purato is made from organic vineyards in Vittoria in the south eastern region of Sicily. The family has been growing for generations and uses all natural organic methods such as cover crops, organic manure and natural herbicides, allowing them to completely eliminate the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. The bottles and labels are all from recycled material. The wine is rich with big berry and cherry flavors balanced out by dry tannins and good acidity.

2009 Terredora di Paolo, Aglianico, Campania $15

100% Aglianico — Terredora is an estate winery run by members of the Mastroberardino family with vineyards all over Campania. Their Aglianico is aged in a combination of barrels and stainless steel tanks, striking a balance between fruit and tannins. It is a bright dark cherry red with spicy aromas of violets, red berries, black cherry and a slight meaty character with subtle oak undertones.

Plus, we had a wonderful Primitivo from Cantele as well. Traffic in the shop was light, but I still didn’t get out of there until 5:30 with working on cards and upcoming tastings. I might have even stayed longer, but as we were printing wine cards, the power blew plunging the entire shop (with the exception of the bathroom) into darkness. Nothing to do but lock up and go home sine the breaker for the shop is in the landlords portion of the building. Good thing it didn’t happen during the tasting.

Had a stuffed pork chop with some wilted spinach and bacon for dinner. Spinach seems to be in season with 2 big bags for $3.00. Guess I’d be stocking up on iron for my body.

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We were up, fed, and out of the house by 9am and off to the airport for my noon+ flight. I’d forgotten how much I dislike the Denver Airport security set-up. I was way too far into the line before I figured out where the priority lane. Oh well.

VERY full flight, no upgrade. I was in an exit row window. Leg room, but cold. Guess I should have originally booked 7C (one row behind bulkhead). Reminds me that I need to use my last upgrade coupon for one of my Oakland flights at the end of the month.

But with this flight I achieved Alaska MVP Gold status. When I go back to New Mexico in early December, that should put me over the tipping point for Premier status on United — not that I think I’ll fly them again with the changes in their Frequent Flyer program. It seems they are only allow Premiers to get Economy Plus seating DAY OF flight, rather than at time of ticketing — nice way to treat people who fly 25,000 flight miles a year.

By 2pm I was at the gate in Seattle, by 3:30 I was home— had to drop off some stuff at the apartment, and pick up other stuff.

3:30 back home, needing a nap.

Quiet evening with a salad and a couple of chicken breasts. Add a couple of loads of laundry and you have my day.

Boring.

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Dan and I headed into Boulder for street shopping and lunch. I found a couple of things for Swanda’s collection, but no phones for myself. There weren’t any Guopon Specials for downtown so we went to see Ted.

Crappy service. Had to ask for the $10 lunch menu. But in the end… they forgot to charge us for the two ice teas, and screwed up the under $10 menu items so that it came out to $19 plus change for the bill. I left a larger than normal tip.

Some thrift store shopping in the afternoon, and then getting stuff for dinner. Just a quite dinner at home for the boys tonight.

Tomorrow back to the airport with no upgrade (but an exit seat).

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