stuff is cool

Gallery photo album of this past weekend here

To my non-grasshopper blog readers, the “grasshoppers” are kind of a moniker for my group of online buddies. To make a long story short, we all sort of started chatting together online thanks to this old linux message board called LinuxNewbie.org (LNO) that had a “ranking” system ranging where you were a junior grasshopper, grasshopper, or senior grasshopper and the moderators were Black Belts. So, we refer to our group as “the grasshoppers”.

So, in continuing the trend of meeting up with them (see: here and here), and actually as a result of a (happy?) accident involving the latter of those two meet-ups, Brett flew in Friday to hang out with me and Meg for a weekend. So, here’s a brief chronicle of his visit to come stay with us.

Friday

Brett’s flight gets in around 2:40pm or so, so I figure to head out around 2:30 and get there around 3:00, slightly early considering he’s got to get luggage that he checked. Unfortunately due to some confusion about what terminal he arrived in (first I thought it was A, then E, and eventually we ended up at C), we didn’t actually meet up until shortly before 4:00. But once we got tot he right place, we were off and cooking. We headed back to Casa Dipmore (or Whitpaolo), gave him the tour and let him get his stuff settled in and then we were off to Rice by 4:45pm or so. Harper (another grasshopper who lives in League City that I had managed to not meet yet) calls me up around 5:00 and we agree to meet up at Two Rows in the Rice Village at 6:00 for dinner and we’d talk about our plans for drinks later.

So, we get to Rice and Meg takes over like she hadn’t missed a beat, as if she was still attending classes and/or parties on campus regularly. First we stop by at Sid Rich college and she visits with Kelly (Penrod?), who gave us our wonderful albeit somewhat disturbed dog, and then we head on up to the 7th floor balcony where “the stacks” (aka huge speakers) are set up, blaring Radiohead (at the time) out to the rest of the campus, and where there is also a pretty awesome view of the downtown Houston skyline. Witness:

What you don’t see in that picture are the 70″ speakers just off to the right, blasting away.

After that, we headed over to Meg’s old college, Baker, where she showed us the very Hogwarts-esque common room and the very antique-feeling library. After that we strolled over past the academic quad to Valhalla where we each threw back a drink (Brett and me: St. Arnold’s, Meg: Lone Star [blech]), and then we headed back to the car to go meet up with Harper at Two Rows.

Two Rows was luckily pretty slow still by the time we got there, so we got a table right away and started drinking some of the custom Two Rows brews (I started with the Honey Blonde, Brett had their Hefeweizen). Shortly thereafter, Harper found us and we ordered our food and some more drinks. Somewhat to my surprise, the conversation flowed very freely, and very rarely ranged towards the geekier topics that one might have expected from a group of online friends. I don’t think Meg was ever made uncomfortable by the three of us, though maybe it was the Nostradominator (a Doppelbock that Two Rows brews) that made me forget.

Once we finished our food, we decided to all head back to our place where we’d all take a cab to go downtown to the Flying Saucer (see this album for some photos from a different night there). Unfortunately, Yellow Cab blows and in spite of us seeing several cabs and hailing down several of them, none of them ever stopped for us and we decided to just light-rail it anyway. Again, we had great conversation and this time even greater drink to accompany it, as Brett chose the Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA and Affligem Blonde, I chose the Pyramid Snowcap and Sierra Nevada Celebration, Harper chose something I forgot and then a Strongbow and Meg stuck with her Wyder’s Raspberry Cider. There were a couple of pretty choice photo opportunities of things in the surroundings that Brett made sure to take advantage of, check those out in the photo album.

One more light-rail ride back, and we parted ways with Harper and called it a night slightly before midnight.

Saturday

The original plan was for me to go to my ultimate winter league games early in the morning while Meg and Brett hit up Agora, perhaps stopping by for a little while to watch me play for a bit. Unfortunately, the temptation to sleep in and perhaps a bit of exhaustion from the previous day meant that Meg and Brett didn’t make it to the fields for my game or to Agora, though thankfully I did make it to my games (although we went 0-2).

After my games a couple of folks invite me to go to eat at Christian’s Tailgate. So, I got the two lazy lumps out of the house and over to Christian’s for lunch, and then we figured now was as good a time as any to go visit the hallowed grounds of Spec’s, one of the biggest liquor stores you’ll ever see. A few blocks of walking and about $100 later, we had fuel for the night. It was about 2:30pm or so by this point, so we kind of hung out and chatted for a little while before Meg went to go take a nap and Brett and I ended up just kind of vegging out on the couch flipping between 24 and Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone before we all ended up asleep. I woke up around 5:30, and Meg woke up shortly after when we decided that we should probably go get some dinner and then come back and start breaking into our new “stash”.

For dinner, I said I was in the mood for sushi, and though Brett’s not a big fan he gave us the okay after seeing the menu (which we found online) for Blue Fish House, one of our favorite sushi places. Meg and I got our perennial faves, only this time we decided to forego our normal sake since we would soon be drinking at home anyway.

Once back at home, we started breaking into the stash and for a bit of background noise and for a bit of a talking point, I threw on the 3rd season DVD of Arrested Development. We mostly watched the show, somewhat commenting on our beverages, when Meg decided she wanted to break into the meat and cheese potion of our stash as well and she and Brett prepared a platter that they brought into the living room that we feasted on. When Saturday Night Live was due to come on (10:30pm here), we switched over to that. When the show was over, Meg and I crapped out and went to bed.

Sunday

To start the day, we met up with Meg’s uncle Tom and cousin Sammy for breakfast at Empire Cafe at 10:00am. Having never been there before, I’ve gotta say that the food was really quite good and that we may have to find out some way to get up before 11am more often on Sunday mornings so we can go there. Afterwards, our initial plan was to go to the Galleria to show Brett “the huge freaking mall in Houston” and the ice rink and perhaps hit up a Texas store for a “Don’t Mess With Texas” outfit for Holden, but when we got back to our place, Meg wasn’t feeling so great (nor was Brett I found out later) and opted to lay down for a while, hopefully to go to the Galleria later.

A little too much time passed, so we never got to go to the Galleria, but around 2:00pm or so Meg came up with the idea of going to Agora since they didn’t get to go the previous day. I initially balked at the idea, but we ended up going, and I’m glad we did. We basically hung out for an hour or so, chatting some more and enjoying our beverages, and then headed back home so we could get everything ready for the drive back to the airport.

On the way back, Brett snapped a shot of the weird “La Luz Del Mundo” building that’s on the east side of 59 on the way to IAH, check it out here and feel free to let us know what you think it may be. My favorite theory so far is some sort of drug kingpin’s residence (like Scarface’s, only more … Greek looking?).

This time at the airport we found the right terminal without any trouble and saw Brett on his way, and I know he’s back at home in one piece so I guess we got him there on time All in all, the whole weekend was pretty great even if a lot of it was just spent sitting around chatting. After all, that’s what we do a lot of the time anyway, right?