Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I’m going to some shindig on Thursday featuring “microroasted artisanal coffees.” Really? “Microroasted?” I was aware of the home roasting trend (I started to call it a craze, but I think that’s overstating the case) but hadn’t run across the term “microroasted.” I’ve actually largely given up coffee (truly, you wouldn’t believe how much caffeine I’d been consuming and for how many years of my life) but this I just gotta see.

I’m so lame. I never got around to posting on Blog Action Day. But my excuse is that I’ve had a real roller coaster of a week. I went from, well, managing myself on Monday to having two direct reports on Wednesday, and that’s only part of it. So yeah, I really do think activism is important, I just didn’t take the arbitrarily designated day to talk about it. I wish I could link to my activism category, but I’ve been slow with this whole content import and re-tagging thing, so I’ve only gotten around to tagging one of my old posts with it. Oh well. There’s always next year.

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On Thursday evening, Karsten and I went to hear Peter Plagens give an art lecture at the Frist with our friends Brad and Jed, and I’m pretty sure we were all creatively inspired. It was awesome. He basically talked about the struggle to embrace the new once you’ve become comfortable and familiar with the not-so-new, but unlike that rather trite-sounding summary, he was articulate and witty and insightful.

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Speaking of embracing the new, I spent this morning working on updating the top-level honeybowtie.com site. I needed to replace a lot of the clunky tables, image-based text styling, and Dreamweaver-generated Javascript from oh-so-long-ago with a more adaptable CSS-based design. I’m not in love with how it looks yet, but it’s definitely a step in the direction I’m trying to go. The idea is to incorporate the blog and the rest of the site a bit more seamlessly, but I’m obviously not there yet.

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Karsten is spending the day working (and I’m occasionally collaborating with him) on a project we’ve been trying to get around to finishing for several months now. Between all the chaos of the house renovation, my day job, our flea and rat troubles, sick cats, and vacation, it’s been delayed a bit. So with any luck we’ll have a scratch demo recorded by tomorrow night, even if it’s only a chorus. The artist we’re communicating with about this song has been waiting long enough and we need to get this one wrapped. I’m also trying to round up some other song ideas she might be interested in, so I guess we have next weekend already planned, too.

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This vodka and tonic is simply perfect. I am a bartending genius, I tell you.

I haven’t mentioned it here, but I stopped drinking any alcohol for the month of November. I overdid it really badly on our company offsite retreat in Alabama, and I couldn’t stand the smell, sight, or thought of alcohol for days. And then I had a series of night sweats that I thought might have been detoxification. And so I thought I should probably dry out for a while, so I decided to give it the whole month.

And I really don’t miss it. Much. Well, sometimes when I get home from work after a particularly stressful day I think about pouring a vodka and tonic, but the thought actually stops there. With mixing the drink. I think I get just as much enjoyment out of preparing my drinks as I do from drinking them.

I don’t know, though. It’s getting close to the end of the month, and I’m kind of looking forward to my first drink in December as a test to see if I’ll still have the taste for it.

So if you love me, you noticed I was offline for about a week. Lie and tell me you love me, dammit.

On Thursday, my employer took us on an overnight retreat to a cabin on a lake in Alabama. We did some “strategizing” and then got really, really drunk.

On Friday, one of my coworkers and I decided to stay an extra night at the cabin and get our respective spouses to come down and stay with us. It was great fun for all five of us: Karsten, me, the other couple, and their parrot. Their parrot, in fact, may have had more fun than anyone. He even developed a crush on me, I’m afraid.

Good thing he didn’t see me on Saturday night in my cat costume.

Oh yeah, so we got back on Saturday just in time for several Halloween parties, which we graced with our costumed presence. You already know my costume — here was Karsten’s:

He was a hillbilly hockey player, or something like that. The ballcap he’s wearing says “Country Western Hockey Tournament” and he found it at a thrift store. It’s real! You can’t make shit like that up. His hockey stick is homemade, and it says “Puckfucker 1000″ down the handle. The mullet wig, however, makes the costume, in my opinion.

Oh, and that’s my coworker Jim grabbing Karsten to keep him from escaping the camera. Jim was a futuristic gay spaceman from the 1950s, or something like that. (Not that Jim is gay, really — only the tight silver gym-queen shirt he wore under his spaceman suit was gay.) He wore a suit covered in duct tape; pretty classic.

Some other costumes seen: witch, devil, zombie vampire, cheerleader, French maid, King Kong & blonde, pirate… oh, and Japanese anime characters. LOVEd that.

Hope everyone’s been doing well… and missing me. Lie and tell me you missed me, dammit!

Oktoberfest looks to have been a big success for the Historic Germantown neighborhood, and our party was a blast. Thanks to everyone who came and partied with us, and my apologies to anyone I may have offended by suggesting they patronize the beer vendors while the festival was still running. We bought plenty of beer from the beer vendors ourselves. Yessir, plenty of beer. Yowch.

We probably had 80 people come through our house on Saturday. Bunches of people from the neighborhood, scads of coworkers and some former coworkers, quite a few songwriters and musicians, and some random good friends from who-knows-where. And 2 dogs. (Luckily, the cats were locked up in the office/studio/cat room for most of the day.)

We had drunk people climbing the scaffolding, but no falls. We had people from across the political spectrum, but no brawls. We had over a dozen people on our front stairs, and they didn’t collapse. All in all, a good day.

What’s your favorite before-dinner drink, alcoholic or otherwise?

What’s your favorite with-dinner drink, alcoholic or otherwise?

What’s your favorite after-dinner drink, alcoholic or otherwise?

Karsten and I huddled and decided to skip the bar and the street party. We’re going to have a private pizza-and-movie party instead, possibly with alcoholic beverages purchased for far less money than would be required in a bar. After further evaluation, we both decided that said bar was seeming less and less like a place where we’d actually have a fun Halloween, and if we weren’t particularly going to be having fun, we’d rather be home with a pizza and a movie.

If you can follow that logic.