Nintendo Wii !!

Today my Wii preorder came!

YAY! I ordered it from work because it was a little cheaper. Business perk I guess. I don't have any games for it, but that's OK. It comes with Wii-Sports and its FUN. Good games will come out soon enough - like Mario World, Smash Brothers and, and, and...

Anyways - you may or may not have seen pictures of it but it has a cool new way of playing games. Like using a motion sensitive laser pointer! It's totally fun. We played at work for a bit.

The hardware is basically a souped up GameCube - it's able to play GameCube games - just pop them in the slot. You can get online and surf like you were at a computer using the Opera web browser. You can buy old skool Nintendo games and download them online.

I'm taking it to Thanksgiving in Arizona - it'll be fun! Of course we'll probably be too busy to play much. :) I'll be back on Tuesday and post pics from our trip soon after.

Have a good holiday!

Michael Thomas Finnegan

This is Michael Thomas.

We found him in the parking lot at our place in NY. I thought we should call him Thomas, and AJ thought he should have an Irish name, so Thomas became Michael Thomas Finnegan. He's one of the best cats ever. He loves to sit on our laps and he comes whenever we call him. He REALLY likes going outside and we often feel bad keeping him indoors. But it's for his own good, right?

Anyways - he's pretty photogenic and last night when we were watching a show on PBS about penguins, he became extremely interested and jumped off AJ's lap to get a better look. It was funny. He stayed there the rest of the show.

Green Festival

On Saturday November 11th we went up to SF to the Green Festival. It was great to be around so many people who think like we do. All the food was either vegetarian or vegan. All the exhibits were about conserving energy, doing clean business, making good food or clothes. It was really great. We're not as gung-ho as a lot of the people we saw there, but we're somewhere in between them and the rest of the "normal" world. It felt good not to feel like a freak.

They are producing a new car here now. It's all electric - you have to plug it in. But it goes up to 40 miles on one charge and gets up to 40 mph. Not bad! They say it comes out to 3cents per mile as opposed to an average of 59cents per mile for those of us who use gasoline. Zero Air Pollution - ZAPcars! Too bad it looks so lame. They're sure to improve on visuals in the near future.

Vegetarian Haggis

A while ago we spotted this English import store on El Camino Real. We went in to see if they had fruit thingies. On the shelf we saw an $8 can of Veggie Haggis. I know, I know. Why the hell would we want to try Haggis and Veggie Haggis for that matter?!?! Well, we figured there was no way in hell we were ever going to eat REAL haggis, so we ought to try this since it had presented itself so extraordinarily.

We waited for turnips to be in season and show up at the farmer's market. Last week they had 'em so we put them and haggis on the menu plan. When the day came we were kind of excited... but a little disturbed at how much the stuff in the can looked like dogfood. Michael Thomas was very curious, so we held it down for him to inspect. (Sometimes they like to inspect our food, but unless it's dairy related, they simply walk away snootily.) Mike was instantly entranced by the haggis and started licking away. Well that was a surprise and kind of a bad sign...

We cooked it up and prepared some potatoes and turnips on the side. In the end it was pretty good. Nobody ever told me that haggis is just a dumb name for meatloaf. Maybe the fact that it was vegetarian coupled with being jammed in a can and shipped around the globe made it that way...

I don't think we'll be having haggis again - vegetarian or not.

Sally the Praying Mantis

Last year there was a praying mantis who hung around our yard a lot. I didn't see her during the winter but one (the same one?) showed up over the weekend. I put her in the hedge, but Michael Thomas saw her. He has a habit of finding the little lizards and killing them, so I put her up high to keep her safe, but she fell. She landed on the cactus/aloe hybrid and impaled her abdomen. I pulled her off and put her back in the bushes. I haven't seen her this week. I hope she didn't die - it looked like a minor flesh wound...

Jess & the Twinkie-Bus-Neatloaf Friday

Friday we went up to the city for a surprise birthday gathering for Jess. It was a pretty cool dive bar and we got to meet up with a few people we haven't seen in a while. We also freaked Jess out cuz she was actually surprised.

First we picked up the bus from Tassi. I gotta say that Tassi's RULES. Bruce is a really awesome guy - I needed to have the rear bearings replaced and they also replaced the drum brakes and all that jazz back there. That's kind of internal serious work that I don't have the tools to do. They only charged me labor for one job. Usually mechanics try to make money by charging for all jobs separately even if they are doing them concurrently. There is a price guide in a little book and they are legally allowed to charge what the book says. That let's them make more money as they get faster as a task. Crazy, huh? Well, Tassi doesn't go for that and even said - get this - when I need to do the front end, HE'LL SHOW ME HOW TO DO IT MYSELF. You gotta love a good mechanic.

Then we headed up to SF and went to a new vegetarian restaurant near the bar Craig planned the shindig at. Well, it was new to us. It's called Ananda Fuara. It was pretty nice but everything on the menu was stuff that Alicia could and does make for us. Actually I had a Neatloaf Sandwich. We had never heard of it and I don't know if "neatloaf" is a trademarked thing, but it was really interesting. The sauce they put on it was good too!

Then we walked over to Butter. It's kind of a dive bar on 11th & Harrison. They have a bunch of weird Smirnoff drinks (some with rootbeer!) and a bunch of food from childhood - like Tater-tots. They also have a deep fried Twinkie... which we tried. Now I know I never have to try one of those again. EVER. Craig had a bunch of us meet there to surprise Jess. He bought us all a beer and then we had cake. He got the cake from Citizen Cake. IT WAS AWESOME! It was fun to see people again and we met some new people too.