Weekend Update

This was another busy weekend. At this rate, I’ve been using my work week as recovery times for my weekends. Friday night was dinner and a movie. Saturday was scuba diving and the Hollywood Bowl. Then Sunday was a BBQ up at Dave’s parent’s house and another movie. Where the hell did my weekend go, and why is my body sore? I didn’t get a single chance to hit up the gym.

Friday

I got off work at the usual time and headed home, fed the little monsters and waited for everyone else to show up. I started aging some steaks the previous Sunday, and took them out of the fridge to bring them to room temperature as I wanted to cook them after aging them for about 4 days. I need a good hour for the steaks to get close enough to room temp. Half an hour in, I season the steaks with salt only. This pulls more moisture out as well.

Angel, Nicky, and Jen arrive and I fire up the stove to heat up the cast iron griddle, once hot, the steaks are thrown onto the iron. Six and a half minutes later, they’re flipped and burned for another 6 and a half minutes. Once done, they’re pulled off the heat and placed on a wire rack and covered with aluminum foil to rest. Time to leave the house and off to dinner we go. We hit up the Lazy Dog cafe in Anaheim, it’s been almost 2 years since I was last here. Food is decent. Helen orders a steak because the steak I cooked at home got her craving steak. I try to stay healthy with some overly priced lettuce wraps. The restaurant has a deal with the theater for cheaper movie tickets if you order an entree, so we save a few bucks on the movie, yay!

There are 5 of us, and of us, only one person hasn’t seen the Despicable Me, but we’re watching it anyways because the group of us actually want to see this movie again. Just as good the second time around, and this time I got to check out the background activities of other minions that were not front and center on the screen. Still, the glow stick scene is my favorite scene. We saw it in 2D. The only real difference is the ending credits. I had the transcript with the translation of what the minions were saying, definitely worth grabbing the translation as it makes the scene that much funnier.

It was a nice relaxing evening with Friends. We get home and Art’s at the house. It’s fairly evident that he peeked under the aluminum foil at the rested steaks. They’re ever so slightly warm. I cut a few slices out for folks to try. And it’s a general consensus that aging it for only 4 days had a better flavor than over aging the piece of meat. At least now I know that I can plan out my steak nights at least 5 days out. Another noticeable difference is that I didn’t use the wood charcoal grill for the steaks. But the flavor of the aged meat is there, and not over powered by the smoky flavor. Successful test completed, no more need for experimentation. I can now get a rig and set up a larger scale steak aging. Well I guess I could do one last experiment. Aged steaks vs fresh steaks. Cook them up and have pure side by side comparison for flavor. Yeah, that will be the next test.

Saturday

I got up around 6:30 AM on Saturday. The car was already packed up with my scuba gear. I did a final check for my equipment before heading out with Art. Art’s coming along to do some fishing off the reef I’m diving at. We get out to the Montage hotel and the parking area is packed. The AA group meeting has grown significantly over the past few months. They’ll only be there until about 8 when parking enforcement starts up. Art gets his gear and heads down while I gear up. He’ll come back and move the car as well as pay for an extra hour of parking while I’m under water. I head down. Walk past the massive gathering of ex alcoholics, and head right into the water. It’s low to mid tide, and the waves are small. There is a bit of surge and there was quite a bit of debris in the water.

Once at my drop zone, I air out and drop down. Water temperature is about 63 degrees at depth. The coldest it got was about 61 degrees. The visibility is ok, about 10-15 feet. Visibility got better when I rounded the reef corner and got into the protected cove like area and just hang out there snapping pictures.

Cruising along the bottom, I stumble upon a massive sheep crap slowly moving along the bottom. I poked at it and snap a picture as well as a short video.

Another cool sight I saw was a school of mackerel that I rarely ever see off the coast of Laguna Beach. So I snapped a few pictures and took another video as well.

During lobster season, every now and then we’ll come across an abandoned lobster trap. The trap either got caught on something, the line connecting the trap broke, or for what ever reason, it got left. Sometimes you can see lobsters inside these traps. And over the course of several months, the beating of the waves, and the corrosive nature of the sea, these traps eventually get broken. Then again, it could also be the work of the local divers just breaking it down so that lobsters don’t get trapped and die for no apparent reason. But still, the broken traps are cool to see, and here’s a picture of one on the ocean floor.

My maximum depth was 27 feet, and my total bottom time was 1 hour and 20 minutes. And I still had about 600 lbs of air left in my tank. I really need to replace the o-ring on my tank so it stops the slow leak of air and I may be able to extend my bottom a little longer. It was good dive, good weather, and I got out grabbed Art and we headed out to Wholesome Foods for some Persian eats. Fresh sangak with humus is damn tasty after a long early morning dive.

We get back to the house around 11:30 and I soak my gear, shower, and make a few calls to see if I can find a date for the Hollywood Bowl that evening. With no luck, I set my alarm on my phone for 4:30 PM and take a nap. Waking up, it’s still friggin hot, and my motivation for heading out to the Bowl is even lower especially without a date. But I find a friend off FB that I’ve seen a total of 3 times and ask her out. She’s currently at work but gets off at 7, which works as the show doesn’t start until 8:30. She’s cute, so motivation quickly returns, and I get a quick picnic basket ready with some drinks, thinly sliced up steak from the previous night, cut up watermelon, and some white peaches. I’m out the door around 6:40 PM.

I get to Arcadia around 7:10 and the cutie’s just closing up shop. She puts a few things away into her car and gets into my car and we head off. First stop is to grab some gas. My gas light turned on somewhere in Laguna that morning. By the time I got to Arcadia, pushing my accelerator a little too much cause a pause and choke with the car, so yeah, there wasn’t much fuel in the tank for the injector system. With a about 5 gallons in the tank, we race off towards Hollywood. My sexy companion has never been to the HWB, so this should be a good time for her.

Got to the HWB, and parked along with the other cars in a sardine like manner. Tiffany takes a picture and is amazed, suggesting that it’ll take us another hour to get out of the parking lot later. I’ve come to accept the stacked parking as part of the evening’s activities and just part of the fun. We head up to the Bowl and find out seats. We’re fairly close, and the crowd is 18,000 strong. The evening’s event is Bugs Bunny at the Symphony.

We enjoy the picnic basket and enjoy the show. Well as much as I could with the loud cunt of a woman that sat behind me. This one really missed the etiquette bus. I looked back to check if she was black. Nope, fat white chick. Yes, thanks for letting your immediate 20 ft radius that you really liked that cartoon when you were a young fat white chick. You are tone deaf, so even humming along to the music is rather unsettling and annoying. Oh then the fireworks finale. Holy Christ, it was like she’d never seen or heard of these magical exploding colors invented by the Chinese. I mean, really, SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY! I vent now because I was being nice. Oh how I so wanted to turn around and scream at the fat cunt. I guess I really was just afraid that she’d turn around and just sit on me. But she seems like one of those Hollywood Bowl newbies, and this was their big night out. I don’t have to worry about seeing them behind me at any of my other concerts. And Americans often wonder why the rest of the world hate you so. Granted the minority speaks volumes louder than the majority, but this little bitch in a nutshell is what we all hate and think of when mentally conjure up an image of your standard waspy American. You can hear bits of pieces of this cunt’s cackling in the background. Oh how I wished just one firework misfired and landed on the bitch, snuffing out a potential taint to the gene pool.

After the show, everyone gets up and like cattle, attempt to leave the theater. I tell Tiffany to hang out and we sit and watch at people that have just left their seats, stand for minutes while they wait to exit the Bowl. Idiots. Looking around, a small number of people, obviously the folks at the far right side of the bell curve, the intelligent folk, are all sitting around just hanging out. Watching and laughing at the bell curve’s middle section of idiots trying to leave. And ladies and gentlemen, this is why frwy traffic exists. Once the crowd thins out, we get up and head down to the car. I stop by the HWB store to pick up some free plastic wine tumblers that HWB gives out to subscribers. I feel special, well not so special when I found out that they were plastic and not nice glass wine glasses. Oh well, they could come in handy for my next trip to the Bowl.

We get to the parking lot and a few people have left. The little asian guy in the white honda Fit is just a gutless wonder and is unwilling to try getting his car out. Hell, with that amount of space, I could get my own car out. Well, this happens. When stop gaps are removed as people show up, I get going and end up cutting off the little timid wuss by several cars. I mean, seriously, you’re not going to get through in life by letting everyone just walk over ya. Take charge, put your foot down. Well, he could be young, then again, I could really care less, I got out. Have fun letting every car cut you off.

I dropped Tiffany off at her car in Arcadia and then headed home. Pretty good evening with a cute girl. Gonna have to do that again sometime.

Sunday

I set my alarm for 10, but actually got out of bed around 11:30 when Angel texted me about heading to Dave’s place. After stumbling out of bed, I responded that I’d pick them up around 12:30. I marinated the frozen hamburger patties with a bunch of spices, brandy, and a can of coke. Packed everything and headed out the door. It was already past 12:30. I picked up Angel and Nicky and had to drop off some things off at my mom’s house. I gave my step dad one of the cooked aged steaks and we left heading up to Reseda. The gas light is on again. And I managed to get up to Eagle Park before having to get leave the 101 to grab gas. We get to Dave’s and some of the folks that came along to the Arizona trip were there. And as usual, we bring color to a white palette.

Dave’s parents were in Arizona, so it was a nice opportunity to use their pool, hang out, and bbq. I’m again appointed to cook by a few of Erin’s friends. No biggie, I kinda ignore them and we splash around in the pool. Very relaxing. Around 4 or so, I get up and help cook. I learned a new trick for making corn. This will definitely come in handy the next time I have corn at a bbq. Burgers and dogs were cooked and everyone was fed. Nicky was starting to feel fairly unsocial, but we hung out for another hour or so and ended up leaving around 6.

Dropping off Nicky, Angel and I head over to the closest movie theater and catch Inception. it’s a 2 and a half hour long movie. I enjoyed it. Not sure if it lived up to all the hype that everyone around me threw after watching it. But I enjoyed it. I may go watch it again. I loved the visual effects. The story was decent and the acting was well done. Having watching other Noland films, he’s definitely got a distinct style that is common in a number of his films. I liked the concept. There were a few slow spots that let you know that this movie was very bloody long, similarly with Dark Knight; but over all, I did enjoy it. I’ll think I’ll spend some time reading up on other folks’ opinion about the movie for more insight.

Getting home around 10:15, I was burnt out. The weekend flew by very quickly as it was just stacked with things to do. And next weekend is Comic Con weekend. This will be interesting.