This Side of Lost

We had chili dogs again. We have improved immeasurably upon our first attempt. Samantha is a vegetarian, by the way, so it's not as easy as it sounds to make a good chili dog for us. But we have discovered the best vegetarian chili dog ever. Behold, and be amazed:

* 4 Quorn Dogs
* 1 cup Texas Pete Chili Sauce
* Shredded cheese of your choice
* 4 hot dog buns of your choice (whole wheat recommended)
* Chopped onion (optional)

Cook Dogs as directed. Heat chili sauce over medium-low heat. Combine ingredients as desired. You can thank us now.

Thanks for all the congrats and well wishing regarding my new job. Sadly, there hasn't been anything notable to report on that front in the past week. Yes, I need to get going on finding an apartment. I'm working on that. If you have suggestions, feel free.

We are moving into the final stages of party planning. Which is good, considering it's in eight days! Hopefully everything will go off well. There's so little that actually will require us doing anything beyond this point that I'm sure it will. I hope everyone has made their hotel reservations at this point... I think I need to release the rest of the rooms soon.

Other things that have happened in the past two weeks or so:

• We saw X-Men 3. I was whelmed. (Neither over nor under.) Effects were cool, action was fun, plot was decent, dialogue was terrible. The most interesting thing about it was the reference to the somewhat infamous X-Men cartoon dub (NSFW). I honestly can't believe they did this. I think it's the first time I've ever seen a bit of True Internet Weirdness™ referenced in an "inside joke" fashion in the mass media.
• Also saw The DaVinci Code. *shrug* I'd venture to say it was better than X-Men, but thats not saying much. I'm guessing that Cars will be the first movie I see this summer that I will really like.
• Mari's new beau Tony hosted a Memorial Day thingie at his place. We grilled chili dogs (the aforementioned kind), sat around a bonfire and talked about Doctor Who. Or at least, other people besides me talked about Doctor Who.
• The Minnesota Twins... sigh. What more is there to say? If they can get their pitching rotation in some semblence of order, things might look up. Joe Mauer has been quite the stud recently, though.
• I have finished reading all the currently published Wheel of Time books. Dear Lord, that took a long time. Yes, I think I can read anything now. To prove this, I have started reading Atlas Shrugged again. Hopefully I will finish it this time.
• My home computer now sports a new hard drive partition and a nifty Linux distribution called Ubuntu. And all this was done without completely destroying Windows XP. I'm fairly impressed with myself. I haven't had a lot of time to play around with the new operating system as of yet. But I like what I see so far.
• We have been rollerblading a fair amount. Unfortunately, we were thrown off course this week by a Village Deli ultimate frisbee game on Monday which left both of us exhausted and me with a gimpy heel. Hopefully that will improve soon.

That is all for now. I'm going to try to post more often -- I seem to have gotten out of the habit again. So, off to find more TIW™!

Banana Phone! (Thanks to Pete for today's True Internet Weirdness™.)

On a whim Saturday, Samantha and I attended a baseball game. It was a beautiful day and I had been meaning to go see the Indianapolis Indians play at some point. Unfortunately, they lost, but that did not diminish the fun we had eating overpriced stadium food, making fun of some of the stranger names on the roster and just soaking up the outdoor baseball experience. I realized that it was the first time I had watched professional baseball outdoors (since my Minnesota Twins have played in the Metrodome for my functional lifetime).

We had fun and we'll probably go again when the Rochester Red Wings (the Twins' AAA affiliate) come to town for a four game series on June 26-29. Anyone interested?

Otherwise, my heel has mostly healed (ha ha, get it?) and we went rollerblading a couple times. I ate lots of beef on Sunday at the Lutheran Campus Ministry cookout. And our party is in five days. Woo-hoo! What's new with you?

Nickel Creek covers Toxic. OMG. Words fail me. Video, too. I had forgotten why they are possibly the best band playing today. I have been reminded.

They were in Bloomington last Tuesday, and sadly we just couldn't afford to go, financially or in terms of free time. I am doubly sorry now that I am aware they they might have played this.

But alas, we have more important things to attend to. Like my family and closest friends rolling into town tomorrow. We are so, so excited to show them the town we've lived in for the past two years and celebrate our marriage with them. This weekend is going to be great. So you'll excuse me if I'm AFB (Away From Blogosphere) for the next few days. In the meantime, just put that MP3 on repeat.

EDIT: I did a bad thing and linked directly to the MP3 instead of the blog post where I found this. And the site that it's from disallows that. Silly me. The link should take you to the site now, where you can hear the song.

Is the name of this particular bit of True Internet Weirdness™. Thanks to Bill for the tip.

Our party was an unqualified success. Many, many thanks to all who came and made it a joyful and wonderful event. It's really a blessing to have friends and family who were willing to make a long trip to celebrate with us. You guys made all our hard work spent planning entirely worth it.

Also, the food was fantastic. If you are looking for a caterer in the Bloomington area, call Nick at The Cake and the Caterer. He is very friendly, flexible and easy to work with -- and the food was awesome. Unfortunately, we ordered a little too much (either that or not enough people showed up), so I've been having sesame peanut noodles for the past three days. But that's okay.

Also, if you took pictures, send copies along. Somehow we avoided bringing our cameras anywhere, so we're counting on you. Don't let us down.

Now that that's over, I have the following things to concentrate on:

• Finding a place to live in Los Angeles.
• Figuring out how to move us from here to Los Angeles
• Attending three weddings in July.

So! On with wasting more time.

In other news:

• I received my official job offer letter in the mail on Friday. Hooray! I considered adding something to "I accept the above offer of employment" in the same fashion that several people did to our RSVPs (e.g. "I accept with pleasure, bitches" "I accept with raucous enthusiasm" "I accept with total acceptance"), but thought better of it.
• Inspired by the recently released third volume of Old Timey Radio Spectacular, we watched Flash Gordon, in all it's cheesy 80's glory. David was along for the ride, whether he was really interested or not. It was pretty fantastic.
• I just learned earlier this week that Guster has a new album coming out next week! It's called Ganging Up on the Sun. Come on, guys, if there's one thing that ganging up on probably won't help you defeat it, it's the sun. Check out the video for their single One Man Wrecking Machine.
• I am about 450 pages in to Atlas Shrugged (out of 1070). I'm thinking Brothers Karamazov next. Eh?

Looks like it's time for more sesame peanut noodles! Whee!

But first, we interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post for this NEWS UPDATE:

Thanks to David for the tip and to Lore Sjöberg, who (like Neil Cicierega) just won't go away. And thank goodness for that.

Anyway. I am excited by the prospect of what will be the last normal weekend I will have in quite a while. We are planning on going to Indianapolis to dork around at the Children's Museum with some of Samantha's fencing friends. Next weekend, I am flying to LA to search for apartments. And the weekend after that begins our Whirlwind Wedding Tour '06. And then I'm moving, maybe? I don't know! Crazy.

In other news:

• The Twins swept the Red Sox! Yeah! We were just nerdy enough to be at Yogi's for two of the three games. Very exciting to see our young hitters really start hitting.
• File this in the Reversal of Fortune category: eight years ago, as a high school senior, I wanted to attend Yale University. Unfortunately, I was a huge slacker at the time and completely missed the admissions deadline, so they didn't even have a chance to reject me (which they surely would have). Fast forward to the present, where having applied for a science librarian position there in March, Yale called me back two days ago and invited me to New Haven for an interview. Now who's too late?
• We have finalized plans for our belated honeymoon. More news on this soon. Rest assured -- it is awesome. You may, in fact, be jealous.

I may take a nap now. I may not. You'll never know. How does that make you feel?

Apparently the Internet has discovered the result of mixing Mentos candies and diet soda (hint -- it's rather explosive). A cursory search of YouTube or Google Video will give you dozens of videos of amateurs in their backyard or on their driveway creating soda geysers. But the fellow at Eepybird truly have this down to an art form.

The technical explanation is that the rough surface of Mentos offers numerous "sites of nucleation" for dissolved carbon dioxide to come out of solution very quickly, creating high pressure. But that's boring. Who wants to try this at home?

Our trip to Indianapolis last weekend was lots of fun. The Children's Museum was, as advertised, totally awesome. We also received Cranium as a belated wedding gift from Leili and Helle, which meant we had to play it, of course, at our gathering at Brian's house afterwards. But not before our 15 minute Nerf war. Aaahh, to be young and goofy...

I have a couple of appointments to see apartments in LA, and I'm planning on making a bunch more before I fly out there on Saturday. Apparently most apartments don't come with refrigerators in the Valley? What's up with this?

Movies we've seen recently:

• Nanny McPhee. We watched this with Samantha's mom before she left town. Pretty fun, very cute, and excellent Emma Thompson in horrible makeup.
• Brick. At Bear's with Jon last night. Meh. I think I would have enjoyed it more if 1) the sound was better -- I missed about half of the dialogue and 2) I was more familiar with the film noir genre that the film clearly owed a lot to.
• The next AFI movie. Ha, just kidding. No, seriously, we'll get to it soon... it's just not that appetizing a selection.

Blah. Back to my 9-hour shift in the labs. Woot indeed.

Craigslist expanded this month, and now there is one for Bloomington! Woo-hoo!

Two particular ones I have in mind:

We saw Superman Returns last night. I enjoyed it. The special effects were well utilized and the plotline was fun. I thought that it moved slowly, though, and wasn't quite as deep as it wanted to be. But it was good. I'd recommend it.

But, MORE IMPORTANTLY, I have some Transformers related links:

• Hasbro announced a new line of toys for November 2006: Transformers Classics. Fun to see some of the oldies-but-goodies getting an update. (Thanks to Jason for the tip.)
• For those of you who enjoyed the Citroen ad with the transforming car (both the original and the version with pre-dance warm up), there's a new one. They have all been rated Totally Sweet.
• The official website for the upcoming movie has a teaser of sorts. I have no idea what it's counting down to -- which is the intended effect, I'm sure. What's happening at 1:00 pm EDT on July 5th?
• And finally, did you know that Optimus Prime is huge in China? Literally. (Thanks to Loren.)

In other news:

• My trip to LA was successful, so far. We've chosen a nice spot with a 2 bedroom available. Now if we can pass the rigorous application process. Credit checks, pay stubs and previous addresses, oh my!
  
• We are starting our Whirlwind Wedding Tour '06 today, as we leave for Stillwater this evening. Our thoughts go out to Tom and Alicia in the last two days of their planning! Although really, our thoughts can only go so far, because they could have eloped. So they were asking for it, really.
• My good high school friend Andy recently informed me that he and his wife Lauren are also moving to the LA metro area (albeit Riverside, which is about as far away from Northridge as you can be and still be in the "LA metro area")! Very exciting. We don't know very many people there yet, so it's nice to have at least a couple of friends to call.
• My friend Megan got engaged last week. It was a little sudden, but far be it from me to criticize about that. :) When you know, you know, and apparently she did. I'll admit that, in the past, when I thought about this inevitably occurring, I wasn't sure how I'd feel about it. But now that it has, I find that all I feel is happiness -- for her and that she's found someone who makes her happy. And that is how it should be for us all.

Here's hoping you're having a happy day too. Peace!