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We just had a “staff meeting”, which included playing games and eating pizza from Stadium Pizza (the new pizza place that replace a porn store a few blocks down the street). Someone brought in Apples to Apples
Go play it right now! Hell, go buy it right now!
This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Jones Soda. All opinions are 100% mine.
If it weren’t for my obsession with ESPN’s Streak for the Cash, the fact that I hadn’t sat down to watch a full NFL game this season is enough to get my sports fan membership taken away. I watched one Vikings game this season, but I slept through the 2nd and 3rd quarter. While that’s generally my preferred way to watch a football game (or NASCAR race for that matter), I feel a little bit bad since, you know, the Vikings are actually playing decently this year.
Had I chosen to move to Seattle instead of Minneapolis, I could be enjoying Sunday football with a 4-pack of Seattle Seahawks Jones Soda. How adorable is that? Maybe since it’s football-related, it’s not supposed to be adorable. As much as I love Jones’ sugar free green apple soda (and I really, really hate most diet soda), I would totally be down for something like that. At least the green would somewhat match the Seahawks’ uniforms. I’m not familiar enough with the Jones Soda varieties to figure out which one would be best paired with the Vikings.
I like how all of a sudden I’m pairing cane sugar based soft drinks with NFL teams like it’s some kind of wine and cheese party.
(Am I the only one that pictures this little clip from Austin Powers whenever you hear “in a nutshell”? P.S. Major crush on Elizabeth Hurley still.)
Anyway, back to my weekend…
PMS + S.A.D. = Hot mess for the weekend.
Holy crap. I seriously just wanted to lay in bed all day Friday and Saturday. Too much dark! The General has a sun light box thingy that we finally fired up Saturday afternoon/evening and I’m glad we did. So glad today starts kicking our days back into longer sunlight!
Earlier this week, I got drafted to participate in a focus group. At the time I was doing my little phone screen to make sure I was qualified, they didn’t mention exactly what kind of focus group it was, other then it was pertaining to food. Hey, I have opinions about food and if someone wants to pay me $75 for 1.5 hours of my time while talking about food, I’m totally not turning it down. You know what that damn focus group ended up being about? BEANS. I’m not even kidding. 90 minutes of discussing beans in a room full of 9 women. Not real high on my list of things I enjoy doing. However, I tend to enjoy things quite a bit more when there’s money involved.
We went around the room briefly introducing ourselves, giving some information as to where we live, our marital status, kids, etc. And then, holy cow, did people have some opinions about beans. BEANS.
These ladies talked about the specific types of beans they liked, why they liked them. The beans they didn’t like. What all they used beans for. How many beans were in each can. The health value of beans. The design of the bean cans. The companies that make beans. The different aisles at the grocery store where you might find specific types of beans. The list goes on and on and on. I didn’t have much to say, not much to say at all. You know how I cook beans? I open the can, pour them into a bowl, and stick them in the microwave. It’s a special recipe I like to call BEANS.
The biggest argument that I can’t possibly get out of my head was the argument on which aisle the beans from companies like Kuner’s (who makes Southwestern style beans), La Preferida (their name sounds Spanish, of course!), and Goya (they have Spanish words printed on their labels) should go. It was an overwhelming decision that these beans should be in the ethnic food aisle. And these ladies? They had some WAY strong opinions on this. I couldn’t have possibly cared less. Not even if I tried.
I may not be invited back to participate in focus groups here actually. The moderator was asking if those of us who loved beans would ever visit bean manufacturer’s websites to get ideas on what to have for dinner. She directly asked me if this was something I would do since I admittedly said I loved beans and I tried to end the discussion civilly by saying no. She asked why not. I explained it the best I could. I told her I loved chicken a lot, too, but that doesn’t mean I’d go to chicken dot com to find out what kind of chicken dish I should make for dinner. Everyone laughed. Except for the moderator. I think she wanted to kick me out.
When Stephanie and I went to Chicago a few years ago, we were determined to visit ESPNZone. We didn’t get around to it until our last day there, but despite her probably broken tail bone and my chipped vertebrae and jacked up right rotator cuff that I’d encountered a few days before we left (thanks to the great car accident of 06), we managed to get there and were way keyed up to play every sports game known to man. It didn’t really happen that way, though.
I’m pretty sure I spent all of my time playing pop-a-shot (because it’s my favorite game of all-time) and Stephanie was playing the hockey version of pop-a-shot… slap-a-puck? Before we left, I had to give it my best go and imitating my favorite Twins pitcher (at the time), Johan Santana, in the pitching game that they had. How convenient that I was in Chicago and got to pretend I was pitching against my arch nemesis A.J. Pierzynski. While I would have rather just thrown the ball at his head, I decided to throw it has hard as I could as close to the strike zone as I could get it. The sad part of this story? I don’t think it went much past 35 mph. I’m clearly cut out for slow pitch softball.
Ever since then, I’ve been thinking that I need a baseball radar gun to see how much I can improve the ol’ pitching speed. That’s completely logical, right?
And if it doubled as a radar gun I could use on cars, I’d totally spend my weekends in my front yard clocking all the jerks that come flying down our side street. It’s two blocks long. There are stop signs on both ends! What’s the point of trying to speed down it that fast?
I haven’t done this in like a month! Since then, I’ve managed a winning streak of 7, but my losing streak of 9 kind of trumps that. I finally managed to break my longest losing streak of all time about one game/match/whatever before I just decided I was done with Streakin’ for the Cash all together. I guess the thing I like about this is that even though I know there’s no way in hell I’m going to make myself eligible for the most wins this month and therefore winning a cool $2500, it still makes me come back every day. Good work, ESPN.
Current Streak: W2
Overall Picks: 252-224-12 (.529) Month Record: 28-27-0 (.509)
3 Goals or More: Hapoel Tel-Aviv scores 3.5 goals per match on average; they allow their opposing team to score 1.0 goals per match. Hamburg SV scores only scores an average of 0.5 goals a game, but Tel-Aviv’s ridiculous offense has the three goals covered. I think. And hope.
147 Points or More: The only reason I’m picking the over on this? Ricky “The Dreamboat” Rubio. Okay, so he’s not really a dreamboat, but more of a 19 year old man child who has the skills that can pay the bills. (Yeah, I just said that) And he probably also has enough skills to up the T’Wolves wins so far this season, but, you know, he’s playing Regal Barcelona instead. (How is that kid only averaging 5.1 points a game right now??)
Pittsburgh Penguins: Mainly because all of the other 7pm-ish games are too close for me to pick and the Penguins seem to be the safe one here. I probably won’t say that tonight.
Phoenix Suns: Steve Nash rules. Half of Portland’s roster is injured. End of story.
Tonight, mi familia and I had a date involving dropping off Christmas donations and hamburgers full of molten lava cheese, thanks to the fine folks at Matt’s Bar.
Jenni, Matt, Stephanie and I had adopted a family via The Aliveness Project. Since Jenni and Matt are somewhere in the Southern Caribbean right now, I volunteered to drop it off tonight. The General and I decided to take The Kid with and just give him a chance to see what happens when a ton of people get together to help others. He’s so damn hard to read sometimes, I have no idea what he really thought about the whole thing. Seeing a back room that’s stacked to the ceiling full of donated Christmas gifts is always a feel-good type of vision, so I hope he was able to at least take a little bit away from it.
Following the do-good portion of the evening, we decided to have dinner at Matt’s Bar. We figured taking a 12 year old to a bar was the appropriate thing to do after exposing him to charity, right? (FYI, it’s not really a bar. It’s a restaurant that has bar in the name.) Dinner was just like it always is at Matt’s — greasy and delicious.
And then, before he went to bed, I gave him ten minutes to write what he liked or didn’t like at Matt’s Bar. I present to you a 12 year old’s review on his dining experience tonight. (Keep in mind, he probably would have went on and on had I not limited his time.)
I liked the Juicy Lucy because it had the cheese inside like a volcano!!! The fries were kinda boring and flavorless. The cheese was AWESOMAZINGLY DELICOUS!!!!! I wonder what kind it was. I always forget how little amount of sprite is in the can. This often leads me to drinking it all right away. The restaurant was very nice and small. This was cool because it made me feel more comfortable and relaxed.
Clearly, you should all go visit. And, since it was his first time jumping on the Jucy (Juicy) Lucy bandwagon, so we took pictures.
You know how you see all of these commercials for getting jewelry for holidays and it usually ends up being a gigantic ring or a tennis bracelet or a necklace with 4508 different birthstones on it or something like that? I totally don’t want any of that. If someone’s getting me jewelry, I can go for two different things: a very simple ring (silver only; no rock at all, please!) or a watch.
I’m slowly advancing my taste from something cheap to something more along the lines of a citizen diamond watch. It might be a little on the fancy side for me, considering the reason I’m not wearing any of my current five watches is because the battery is dead and I’m too lazy to take them into a store to have them changed. So lazy, in fact, that I’ve asked my parents for watch batteries two years in a row. They don’t seem to think I’m serious about it. But if they were looking for an example of a kind of watch I might want, this would be it:
The Kid, who has been wearing a digital watch that says on his arm via velcro, might need a watch one of these days, but for now, he’s going to have to stick to that one. The digital watches I found on bluedial.com have way too many buttons that would very likely tempt him into trying to turn on all the fire alarms at his school just by pressing buttons. And, trust me, if a 12 year old could figure it out, it’s probably The Kid.
