This weekend was fabulous. It was EL's first time in Houston and we had an incredible time. I called and reserved the smallest, cheapest rental available because I knew we weren't going to be going far this weekend and wanted to same some cha-ching for activities. When I showed up to pick up my hoopty, the rental place said that none of them had been returned on time and they were going to have to give me another class car (for the same price). No problem. Within a few minutes, I was on my way to the airport in a gigantic king-cab long bed pick-up truck... ready for traffic. I don't know if any of you have ever tried to exit downtown Houston on US59 north, but it is not an easy task. I ended up taking 45... not a good plan... traffic sucked. I could have run them all over. It would have been like a Monster Truck Rally on I-45. Anyhoo, seeing her come out of the concourse was worth every bit of the traffic hell enroute. We went straight from the airport to
Sam's for a great fondue dinner. His wife is native Swiss and he grew up in Switzerland, so they know how to do it right. The cheese was awesome... his own blend of cheeses with a certain type of schnapps. Great stuff. The meal was finished off with a variety of imported chocolate from his wife's
homeland and some tasty coffee. Between my long work day and hassle with rush hour traffic and her travel, by the time we got to the house we were ready for the much needed coma that was heading toward us like a freight train.
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Saturday morning was lazy. We managed to make it to Fadi's for lunch during out meandering around town. I basically was just showing her around inside the loop and explaining the basic layout of the city. After an hour or so, she conceded that she required time to digest and that we had passed into sensory overload mode. Houston is big... very big... and diverse... a lot to take in at once. Remembering my first experience with this city, I understood and forced myself not to be the tour bus driver with the microphone in his cheek like a squirrel burying a nut for winter. We stopped by Jean-Paul and Maria Elena's for a glass of wine and some conversation before taking care of some errands that I wanted to get done. Candle replenishment... groceries... etc. I know, not exactly a romantic weekend activity, but it was fun to just be spending the time together. We had some time before we were suppose to meet up with Mike and Madelaine for dinner, so we headed to
Sky Bar for a cocktail after changing at the house for the evening's events.
Completely unknown to me,
Sky Bar doesn't open until eight on Saturday night, so it was closed when we arrived. We were close to
Downing Street, so we went there instead. A couple of martinis later, Mike called to inform me they were leaving his new phat house down by the beach, so we headed to the restaurant. I'm a meatasaurus and fortunately, EL is a meatasaurus too, so we were anxious and hungry for what we were about to experience... a festival of meat.
Holy shit. Fogo de Chao is fucktabulous. The meat selection (picanha, filet mignon, fraldinha, costela de porco, linguica, alcatra, costela, cordeiro, frango) was unreal. Those guys will just keep bringing meat until you explode as long as the puck is green. The four of us rolled out of there completely satisfied with our engorged bellies... $310 poorer and fattened up for winter. Madelaine wanted to go to
Sullivan's despite mine and Mike's protest. We went to
Sullivan's. Valet parked the car, walked about 10 feet inside the door, turned around and walked out, gave valet the ticket that was still warm from his hand. That place was just as packed and pretentious as I had remembered it to be. My vote was going back to
Downing Street.
Everybody seemed to be ok with that... so
Downing Street Pub it was. I love that place. It's my favorite cigar bar in Houston. We stopped in the beautiful walk-in humidor for some stogies... two
AVO's for Mike and I and a mango smoke for my lady. We managed to snake a booth table close to the bar where we could continue our fun evening while sitting vice migrating as the chaos of the crowd shifted like sea currents.
There was a uniformed
police officer standing near our table... on duty. He had apparently motioned to the bartender for a
RedBull to which the bartender obliged and threw him a RedBull. A can of
RedBull. A full, unopened can of
RedBull... over the bar... over the crown... and unfortunately, over the officer.
SMACK! A full, thrown, can of
RedBull that hit EL in the arm. Luckily, we had all been drinking a bit, so her first reaction was more of a "hey! kick ass! it's raining redbull in here" and less of a "holy shit! this can just broke my arm!". The bartender bought our table a round in apology and it was all good. EL was ok... other than a really sore arm (I'm assuming it is still sore today).
Sunday was a lazy day. It was raining. We stayed in the warm, dry house all day. Ordered delivery. Looked at old pictures and through various memorabilia. I think the first time we left the house was to eat on the way to the airport last night. We had dinner at
Prego in the village. The food was good, but the service sucked. Really sucked. It was really hard to put her on the plane. I hated to see her go. The weekend kinda flew by... I miss her tremendously. She'll be back on Wednesday. My home computer is still broken. I fiddled with some of the components and managed to get it to post before hanging. It doesn't make it to the bootloader (
GRUB). I'm going to pull all the guts out and spray down the slots and interconnections with some of that fun-to-play-with high pressure dusting stuff, then reassemble it and see if that magic works. I just need to get my damn financial back up files off the other partition and unfortunately my server is SCSI and my home PC is EIDE so I can't just throw the drive in the other box and mount it. Oh well, it's just one more thing on my to-do list between now and Wednesday... like wrap EL's Valentine's gift. Heh.
Is it Friday yet? I am so not happy with work this morning.
