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Archive for the 'Parties' Category

Viva Las Vegas!

Last weekend, the crew from Le Maison Bleu reunited once again in Las Vegas!

Justin and I hopped on a plane after work on Friday for a long weekend bender of drinking and gambling. There are too many crazy stories to tell, but we all had a great time. The good news is that no one got arrested or went to the hospital. The bad news is I came back with less money than I left with, but its all good. I got some good poker in and tried my hand at craps for the first time. I don’t think I really understand the game yet (craps) but its a lot of fun with a good crowd.

Saturday night Justin, Morgan, Mark, and I went to see the Cirque du Soleil production of KA at the MGM Grand. It was an amazing production with awesome music and dance. The most impressive and unique feature of this show was the moving stage which rotated while the actors were performing. This is the second Cirque show I have seen, last summer Justin and I saw Varekai in Baltimore.

One of my highlights was going to the Forum Shops in Caesar’s Palace to visit Vosges chocolatier. They are a couture specialty shop who fuse interesting ingredients to create a wonderful chocolate experience. I purchased a few truffles for my friends as well as three interesting bars: the Barcelona bar (smoke almonds, gray sea salt, milk chocolate), the Woolloomooloo bar (roasted & salted macadamia nuts, Indonesian coconut, hemp seed, milk chocolate) and the Black Pearl bar (ginger, wasabi, black sesame seeds, dark chocolate). This stuff doesn’t come cheap, truffles ranged from $2 to $8 for a single piece and 100g bars which started at $6.

Also, on recommendation from my parents, we tried out one of Wolfgang Puck’s (many) restaurants in Vegas. Spagos, which is in Caesar’s, is their favorite and our little crew had a good time. Its no trip to Vegas without a buffet which we took care of with the rest of the group on Monday morning. Monday night Justin and I also stopped over at Mon Ami, Gabi for some food before our flight.

As you can tell I love food :)

The weather was unseasonably cold; the last time Justin and I went it was in the mid to high 80s (F) and this time around it was in the 50s with rain here and there. Walking around was a bit cold, but most of the buildings have interconnected walkways which made travel much easier.

When yinz get your pictures up, drop the link so we can share. I put some of my favorites up from Justin’s camera here and I imagine he will be putting all of them up on his website sometime soon.

seele :: Mar.21.2006 :: General, Life, Parties :: 1 Comment »

Geeking, Drinking, and Family (a weekend)

Sometimes its hard to find something everyone wants to do, so you just have to throw a party!

Justin and I had people over Friday night to hang out and socialize. The evening started out pretty interesting when Katie showed up with her ham radio. I’m not too familiar with amateur radio (Katie has a transmitter license), but it was still pretty excited. Apparently there was broadcast that night and as soon as she got to our place. So as soon as she got here we all grabbed beers and went out to her car to try to set up her gear before it closed. Putting the thing together was almost as fun as listening to the broadcast, Justin wouldn’t let me post the picture of him holding his ‘rod’ (even tho *I* took it), so you’ll have to wait until he puts it up on his blog to see it. It was my first experience with such a high altitude broadcast, there was even a reply from the International Space Station.

Tailgate party for a broadcast, hells yeah. We had a few neighbors stare at us on passing or through open windows, it probably was a bit strange looking for a bunch of kids (well, I guess were not really kids) to be hanging out in a parking lot drinking beer and putting a giant antenna together.

More people began to show up a bit later for a good night of hanging out, snacking, and playing some weird card game I think Brian just made up and isn’t really real. Justin also got people in to playing a dice game called Three Man. Overall it was a great time with some people I haven’t seen in a bit.

A party Friday night may not have been the smartest thing to do for wanting to wake up and drive to Pittsburgh early the next morning. Needless to say we didn’t leave first thing in the morning, and got up to Justin’s parent’s place a little after noon. Luckily the family party we were going to wasn’t early that evening, so his dad helped him work on his taxes while I watched (I’ve never done my own taxes before and I think I messed them up when I tried to do them myself). Let me just say that without the aid of software (that is fairly usable, but it still had its moments) I don’t know how normal people do them right. They’re so ambiguous and unless you know about a certain thing, you would never be able to figure it out yourself.

Afterwards we headed to his family’s party for a bunch of cousins who are having birthdays in March. I did a good job of hurting myself after slipping down some carpeted stairs, that night my tailbone hurt and now I have a painful knot in my side under my ribs (I have no idea how I even hurt my side, I landed on my ass!). The Penguins game made up for it thought, we won 6 to 3 (New Jersey) with 2 of the goals in the first two minutes of the game! It was also a nice way to start the night out on the town as we met up with some friends at the bar (some of which are going to Vegas with us next weekend).

Today on our way home we stopped home at my parents for lunch. We had some great chicken and stuffing along with my mom’s famous apple pie. My dad was in story telling mode (when is he not?) and told us some old stories about the crazy time he had in Venezuela a while back. They like to travel a lot and are going to Puerto Rico this weekend. They have friends they wanted to ship wine to there, but after shipping and taxes it would be over $100 to do so. What do they do instead? Book a flight and decide to just take it to them. I don’t know how cost effective that is but it sure sounds like fun.

Finally after our long trek back, I had a great suprise in the mailbox. My copy of Interfaces from the British HCI group had arrived with the article Jan and I wrote. I have to say I’m a bit excited about this, I haven’t had an article published in such a well known magazine.

Alas, now it is time for homework. I have a midterm due Tuesday as well as some other things I must catch up on for school and work before I leave for the west coast. Buzzy, busey :)