Well, I was right - it did piss me off. Didn't win a game all night.
My backhand is certainly my weakness and once they knew it they kept hitting it there. Oh well... I hadn't played more than 20 minutes of ping pong in my life probably and for the most part got better with each game. A game like that with such a fine touch takes some time to get used to I guess. Maybe we'll play again Sunday when we go over there after Kristi and Tim's cookout.
This week is taking forever... even with stuff to do each night it's been dragging on and on. Tonight is that beer tasting at Flying Saucer and at least tomorrow is Friday - but seriously, Saturday needs to get here and get here quickly!
Met up with Kevin and Courtney tonight after work for dinner and drinks at Hunter Gatherer. It's a small microbrew place here with odd food. Though they did have a good burger, so at least there was something worth ordering.
Definitely needed the happy hour tonight too - crazy at work lately (still) ((always))... bah. We're just way too busy.
Tomorrow night we're going over to Jane and Wendells to grill, swim, and play some ping pong - should be a good night. I haven't played ping pong in years, so I'm sure it'll just end up pissing me off.
First Steve Spurrier show was this morning! Previewing the season basically. It's a sign of just how close the season is to starting. In fact, since it's Sunday today, the season technically starts this week!
We're both anxious for the first game - this time next Saturday we will down there tailgating. First game is Louisana Lafayette... thankfully not a powerhouse team since our starting Quarterback couldn't seem to bring himself to go to class over the summer so he'll be sitting out with a suspension. No matter, it'll still be a good time.
It's going to make for a very long week of waiting though. To help the time go by quicker though, we're going to a beer tasting/dinner on Thursday night. Some girls Christina works with may be joining us since they went to the one at our Zoo in Columbia and they were disappointed with it. I have a feeling Flying Saucer can do a better job - the beer tasting we went to 2 or 3 years back was really good.
This next weekend is also finally a long weekend for us. We don't get all the usual holidays working for USC since they save up a lot of them for around Christmas. We usually don't get Labor Day for example. This year for some reason we are getting that Monday off and you'll hear no complaints from me. Sunday we're going to a cookout that day at Kristi and Tim's place and then we're all going over to Jane and Wendells for swimming later that night. Should be a good Labor Day weekend.
Can't believe how busy things have been since getting back...
But, the trip was still a good recharge for both of us. Ended up being a 10-day trip, but it felt much quicker than that.
If you don't care to read all of my drivel, the link to the photo gallery from the trip is down a bit, below what is bound to be a lengthly post.
Friday night (late, because we were slack getting ready) we drove to Nicki's to see her and Anna. Saturday we went to Wolf Mountain Vineyards for lunch and a wine tasting and tour. Food was pretty good - wine was very good. The place is really nice, overlooking some of the foothills in the area. I think we'll try to go back there around Thanksgiving to see the fall colors.
The tour was really nice too - learned far more than I expected about grape vines and the whole process of making wine. Tour guide was really good too - apparently he's worked at pretty large vineyards out in California so he really knew his stuff.
After the vineyard, we decided to drive 20 minutes or so to see Amicalola Falls, Georgia's highest waterfall at 729 feet. It's a nice, broken falls and it was good light too, so there are a few photos from there too.
We took off from Nicki's on Sunday morning to head North and made it to Troy, OH before stopping for the night. Not sure why, but for some reason the drive seemed far quicker than normal on both the way there and the way back.
Had a nice time up in Michigan seeing the family and taking a few side trips too. Got to see Brian and Tasha's new house - he still had a long way to go on it when we were last up there. It's a beautiful house and they did a great job inside decorating it - modern and simple. Christina wanted photos for when she works on a painting for them, so we took a few shots before leaving Saturday morning and they're in the gallery below also.
Tuesday we took a trip up to Tawas, Michigan on Lake Huron. Tawas has a point that hooks around out into the Lake making for Tawas Bay. The point has a lighthouse on it, a beach on the Lake side, and small dunes on the Bay side. Though water levels up there are so low that even Lake Huron is showing it - out from the dunes there was a large "beach" of muck as the Bay is retreating. Hard to explain, but as always, we took photos...
Later that night we went out to dinner with Randall and Shelley to a new restuarant in Mt. Pleasent called Mountain Town. Nice place, next to a park, a creek, and railroad tracks, but the food was hit and miss. The restuarant offers an interesting trip too - a 5 to 6 hour train ride round trip up to Cadillac, Michigan. Serves a fancy dinner and takes you there to shop apparently. $70/person, but the train trip sounds fun.
Thursday we made a day of it by going back to see Frankenmuth again, a German-style tourist town. We'd been there once before in the Winter, so it was nice seeing it with a little better weather. Spent a few hours there, had a really good lunch with various German foods, and then we drove over to see my Grandma and my Aunt since they live around 20-30 minutes from there.
Left Frankenmuth with just enough time to get back to Midland to catch a minor league baseball game. Midland just got a new single-A team named the Great Lakes Loons. They lost. But the stadium was nice. And yes, there are photos of that too...
Friday we went back to Mt. Pleasent with my Mom to get lunch where she used to eat when she was in College at Central Michigan University, the Pixie. Known for their coney dogs, it was a cool place to eat. After lunch we went to the Soaring Eagle Casino and the Chippewa Indians gave me back a little of the money I had given them the previous few times I had been there. Won $160 on a $1 slot machine... good times. :)
The trip back went pretty smooth too - we got an earlier start than we're used to, 8:30am. So, instead of driving until 9-10pm like we normally do and since we didn't sleep worth anything the previous night, we decided to stop at 6pm in Knoxville right before the mountains on I-40. Instead of taking I-640 around Knoxville, I detoured into downtown and at our first or second red light we saw a Hampton Inn. Since we always try to stay in Hamptons when travelling if possible, we stopped in there to check if they had a room available. I think we got the last one since it was move-in weekend for the University of Tennessee students and there were a lot of parents in town with them. Turns out that last available room was a pretty nice corner studio suite. I took a few pictures of the room and the view out of our window of Neyland Stadium (Tennessee's football stadium) and of a stone church where a couple was posing for wedding photos.
After checking in, we decided to find somewhere to eat and ended up driving across one of the two bridges and Christina saw a restuarant called Calhoun's on the River - a barbaque place on "Volunteer Landing". Tennessee's football stadium is located right on the river and lots of tailgaters show up by boat and there's a large riverfront area just down from the stadium. The food there was great - the wait, not so much. Hour and seventeen minutes just to get seated... course, we did get there at 7:30 on a Saturday night.
We toured Knoxville and the UT campus a little the next morning and then got back on the road. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful and we got back Sunday afternoon.
Before the photo gallery, a couple stats from the trip:
Miles: 2,857
License plates seen (in order): Georgia, South Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Indiana, Arizona, Kentucky, Kansas, Illinois, Texas, Arkansas, Iowa, Oregon, Wisconsin, Missouri, Oklahoma, North Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, Mississippi, Michigan, Maine, Louisiana, Nebraska, Delaware, Utah, Maryland, Montana, Pennsylvania, California, Washington, New York, Minnesota, New Jersey, Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, Hawaii, and New Mexico. Also saw Ontario and British Columbia.
Total of 42 states and 2 Canadian plates... not too bad.
And finally, the photos... click the image or the link below to go to the gallery (15 pages total):
We're about 50 miles south of Cincinnati - got a late start this morning, but we've made good time for most of the drive, so it's worked out okay.
Haven't made any side trips off the beaten path today really. We had a nice lunch yesterday at a winery in Dalonega, GA and went to see a waterfall about 15 miles from there - got some nice photos at each place.
Not sure how far we're driving tonight or what else is on the agenda - neither of us feel like driving straight through so we'll probably stop somewhere North of Cincinnati, just not sure how far north. It'd be nice to make Findlay and only leave 3.5 hours left for tomorrow.
Also, Christina took this photo a couple hours ago when we were in Northern Tennessee just before crossing into Kentucky:
Well, we're certainly getting a late start to our vacation.
We're just leaving Columbia and driving up I-26 right now on our way to Atlanta. Too much to get done before we left to leave earlier.
Thought I'd post an update on the blog for no other reason than the fact that I could. I've hacked my Verizon phone so that it can hook up to my computer with a USB cable for free and act as a data modem. Granted, it took us only 10 minutes to get far enough out of the Columbia area to lose EVDO speeds on the cell phone connection, so it's at what's called 1X speeds now. EVDO is around 200-500kbps average with bursts higher than that - so a good bit faster than dialup. 1X speed is a bit slower though, so I'm going to just save this post and shutdown I guess...
We actually managed to win one of our 'Championship Week' games in bowling yesterday. Which made up for getting played the game before. We play three games the final week. First game is a normal game where we all bowl our own individual games against another team, mostly for practice. The tournament's seeding is determined by the first game.
Well, the team we were playing beat us by 80 pins and since there's no handicaps the final week they won. We're fine with losing, hell, we're used to it... but it turns out that the girl who normally bowls with them wasn't there that night and they had a sub instead. The missing girl averaged 70 for the league. The sub last night bowled a 165. Take those 95 extra pins away from them and we'd have won...
Ah well - we're done bowling for a while now. No Fall league, so it'll be until the New Year before we bowl again. I think Tim and Kristi and us are still going to try to get together once a week and do something else as a replacement, but we're not sure what yet. All I know is that open bowling is something like $3.95/person/game and there's no way I'm paying $23 plus shoes each week when our whole 5 week league only cost $20/person total.
Work has finally slowed down some *knocks on wood*. The domain rollout project is still on hold, but now only because I'll be off next week. Scott comes back from vacation tomorrow which will be nice - it'll help knock out the final few lingering support issues. I should have everything else I'm working on finished before we leave.
Looking forward to getting out of town - and out of this record 105 degree heat. Broke a record from 1900 of 102 degrees. In fact, just a few minutes ago they said that outside right now the heat index is still 99 degrees. Blah.
My life has been taken over this last week and weekend. Rented a game for the Xbox 360 called Overlord. You're basically an evil Overlord who looks a lot like Sauron from Lord of the Rings. You have an army of little minion demons that you can have attack things and collect things for your character. Gameplay is unique and smooth and works really well once you get used to all the controls.
This game finally got my Gamerscore over 1,000, though I've only had my Elite since late April and haven't had a chance to play it much. Achievements and points come pretty easily in this game since you have to be pretty bad to die in it.
In even bigger news, football started yesterday. First NFL pre-season game was on last night between the Saints and the Steelers. Makes me even more ready for our season to start. 27 days to go! Players have already started practice too.
This year's regular season in our bowling league ended with our usual fizzle... lost 2 of 3 games last Tuesday, our usual mark. It's sad that we all know how handicap leagues work and that it's all about improvement, yet we still stay the same or get worse each week. This Tuesday is the Championship night, where only scratch pins are counted in a double-elimination style tourney. Last league for Summer I in June we were two games and done. We'll see how it goes this time around.
There is no Fall league, so we'll have a break from it for a while at least. Which works out since next weekend I think we're going to try to go visit Nicki and Anna in Atlanta, then shoot up to Michigan for the week. Hopefully escape these crazy temperatures - yesterday through something like Wednesday it's supposed to be near or above 100 degrees.
Regardless, it'll be great to get a break from everything. Our project at work has been rolling along with a snag here and there - IPSec sucks - but we've been so busy I haven't had much time to really make much progress on moving everyone over. At the rate things are going, since I know we always get slammed at the start of the Fall semester, we'll probably have the project ongoing through late October at least. But, I'm taking next week off anyway and for once I'm actually glad to say I'll be in dial-up country... let Marty and Scott handle everything for a week! Now I just need to 'accidentally' leave my cell phone here when I leave.
