Also, We Were All Wearing Silly Hats

This week I attended two holiday beer tastings: one at the Mercury Lounge last Sunday, and one yesterday hosted by one of the local homebrewing clubs. The former was moderately serious, with a beautiful printed program and several discussions about the history of the beers we were tasting. The latter — entitled the 12 Beers of Christmas — was distinctly less formal. One of the hosts, under the pseudonym of Irving Berlinerweisse, had re-written the lyrics to a number of Christmas carols around the topic of beer. So in between the “Brewer’s Dozen” (which turned out to be fifteen) beers we tasted, we sang songs like “It’s The Most Wonderful Time To Drink Beer”, “Let It Flow”, and “Simcoe the Red-Nosed Hop Cone.”

The only problem was that we ran out of songs in the first third of the event, so the organizers asked us to come up with new ones on the fly. My table’s contribution was a re-working of “I Have A Little Dreidel” that went like this:

Pitcher, pitcher, pitcher
A pitcher I will drink
And when I find it’s empty
Another one I think.

Sadly, we couldn’t come up with good enough lyrics for our favorite title, “Do You Taste What I Taste?”

She Has A Point

Thanks to the same folks who brought us Oktubafest, tonight the Mercury Lounge was filled with sounds of Christmas carols… played in four-part harmony on a dozen tubas. It was simultaneously quirky and exactly right.

One point Gwen looked around and I said, “I could see you running a place like this.”

Who Am I Again?

It’s important for me to keep track of which fictional person I am at any given time.

I’m now playing in two on-going LARP campaigns. In Houses of the Blooded, I’m playing Xander Yvarai, a distinguished composer of opera and renowned duelist who is recently married and is trying to put his rakish past behind him. In Dying Kingdoms, I’m playing Marcus of Albeira, a street-raised orphan who pulled himself out of the dire circumstances of his birth through service (as a quartermaster) in the legions of the Illumin Empire and is trying to use his newly-acquired position and powers to improve the lot of the people who are in the same circumstance he was in. When these games have events on back-to-back weekends, I occasionally get confused while I’m doing my preparations about which character I’m planning for.

That my friend Laura is playing both Xander’s wife and Marcus’s sister doesn’t help.

Update

Fitness: Ran 9 miles

Training Pays Off

A few months ago, my friend Jill said on Twitter:

Fun workout this morning w/my marathon training group. Ran ~13mi total, including a 2mi tempo & 800 meter repeats around a wood chip trail

And I thought, “That’s crazy. I could never just go out and run 13 miles on a Saturday morning.”

Fast forward to last night after wine tasting with some friends of mine visiting from out of town. It turns out that Mike has just run a marathon and that he had Jeff are training for another race right now. So Jeff says to me, “We’re looking to go on a ten to twelve mile run in the morning. Where should we go?” I start to think about, I start describing a few ideas, and then I stop and say, “I’ll meet you at your hotel at 6:30.”

This morning, the three us went on an eleven mile run. It’s not quite the half-marathon distance Jill was talking about, but it’s still a substantial amount of running. The fact that I could just decide last night that I was going to do it and then pull it off made me feel — quite frankly — awesome.

Update

Fitness: Ran 11 miles

She's Right

The Boss
A play in one scene

The Players
Sarah, a barista
Paul, a regular patron
First Woman, a coffee drinker
Second Woman, another coffee drinker

The Scene
A Starbucks, at the end of lunch hour.

Sarah stands at the espresso machine. Paul sits at the bar, typing on his laptop. The two women stand, waiting for their drinks.

Paul rises, closes his laptop, and begins to put it in his bag.

Sarah: You can’t leave.

Paul: You’re not the boss of me.

First Woman: My daughter used to say that to her swim teacher when she was four.

Second Woman: I wonder where she learned it?

First Woman: I don’t know. But she still says it all the time.

Paul: I have to go back to work.

Sarah: I guess that’s okay.

First Woman: Because someone there is the boss of him.

Exit Paul

Update

Fitness: Rest day
Sun, Moon, and Stars: 0 words, 173 seven-day average, 282 average, 54239 total, 761 to go for the week