Pour us a road, we’ll both drink and drive

Sometimes, we’re so counterproductive in our society, it’s a wonder we get anything accomplished. Hell, look at government as a good example! Seriously though, if we used just a slice of common sense, we might actually get to the other side of the road and go, “Huh, if I had known it was that easy, I would’ve done that a long time ago!”

The reason I’m mentioning this is that last night, I took a friends brother who is in town for the week to my favorite hockey bar to watch Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals while my friend was busy with a previous commitment. After I arrived home from work, changed and was heading out the door, my brother walked in and asked where I was headed, so I mentioned it to him and asked if he wanted to join us. Now I know my brother is only 19 years old, but he has been in this bar before, not with me, but with some other people that know the owners, so I figured we’d be ok.

We get to the bar, find some seats and get ready to sit down, but the bartender spotted us as we were walking in and asked to see everyone’s ID. First off, um, hello? I have a beard and some grayish hair; I think I can pass for 21! Second, I mentioned that my brother wasn’t 21, but we brought him so he could be our designated driver, which I thought would be a logical excuse. It wasn’t likely that he’d be drinking; however, the law in Texas says that he can’t be in there, but then, it also says this:

In Houston, Texas, beer many not be purchased after midnight on Sunday, but can be purchased anytime on Monday...which happens to begin right after midnight on Sunday! So it's illegal to buy it when it’s legal to buy it?

I digress.

This left us with two options, pick up some beer, go back to the house and watch the game, or I drive my brother home and come back. He said it was ok if I took him home and I mentioned option 1, but he said he was cool with going home, so I drove him back there and headed back to the bar to hang out with my friends’ brother.

This brings about non-logical point number two: I know have to waste gas to drive my brother home. This is really not the time to be wasting energy resources! If we let him stay at the bar, I can drink a little more and have a safe, reliable driver waiting to take me home AND only use one trip’s worth of gas. This is opposed to the two trip’s worth of gas I had to use to take him home and then try not to drink too much so I could be a responsible driver for myself. Does that make sense to anyone? Sober driver and less gas used, or slightly intoxicated driver and more gas used, which sounds better?

On a side note, my brother is not a big hockey fan because he grew up in the south, whereas I grew up in the north. He has watched a number of games at home with me during the playoffs, but he’s just not a big fan in general. My friends’ brother on the other hand…anyway.

Needless to say, tomorrow night, we’re staying in to watch the game.

Goin' to the Chapel and we're gonna get married...

Well, not really, because this was a Jewish wedding, and it wasn’t even at a Synagogue. I wrote about this wedding last week in this post. I wasn’t just in the wedding party, oh no. It was a whole weekend of wedding parties, because these people love to party…and party we did.

Have I mentioned I hate Halloween? Oh yes, I have. Nonetheless, part of this wedding weekend spectacular was the costume party after the rehearsal dinner. I was the hit of the party, which was completely ironic in so many ways: remember, this was a Jewish wedding; how much I hate Halloween; my lack of religion; and the fact that my costume idea was the only thing I could think of for this party. So a convict, Captain Morgan and Jesus walk into a bar… If you don’t understand why this is funny, well, I’m sorry you have to go through life feeling like this (and yes, I am holding 2 bottles of beer in the same hand – it was late, I was drunk, get over it).

Anyway, the wedding weekend was fantastic; fun was had by all, glasses were stomped on, Mazel Tov’s were shouted, everybody held their peace and nobody said, “I don’t”. I would say that’s a successful wedding!

In unrelated news, I finished my paper – for the class I didn’t really understand the material – and received 223/250 points. That’s not bad for about 2000 words of BS! So, I have passed one of my last 2 classes and I just have to finish 4 more Supreme Court briefs to be finished in my other class. Then I go to NYC for Veteran’s Day weekend with the girlfriend to see my friends and I am off from school until January 9, 2007 – that’s almost 2 months of freedom. What will I do with myself? Well, maybe I’ll be able to spend some time keeping this blog updated. Ummm…don’t hold your breath!

Happy Halloween!

A bottle of white, a bottle of red. Perhaps a bottle of rose instead?

Why is it that when you go out with a large group of people for dinner, someone inevitably says, let’s just take the bill and divide it by X number of people we have? In theory, this is a reasonable idea; however, because I am the person who usually does not drink all the wine, or have the $9 appetizer, I wind up being screwed. It’s even worse when we go out for someone’s birthday because that person doesn’t pay, so there is one less to divide by. Over the weekend, twelve of us went out for a friend’s birthday and our share of the bill turned out to be $50 each. I had a $9.95 burger and $1.95 Dr. Pepper. Even including my share of the birthday boy’s meal and a couple of bucks for the cake we bought, how does that equate to $50? I had none of the seven $18 bottles of wine; I didn’t eat any of the five different $9.95 appetizers that were ordered. I was royally screwed and I didn’t even enjoy it. My burger was undercooked and greasier that it should’ve been. The fries were lukewarm. I don’t plan on going back to that restaurant either, but that’s for another day. One of these days I’m going to bring a notepad and a calculator, see who eats and drinks what and calculate the bill that way. We’ll see how they like it when the person who drank two bottles of wine, had an appetizer, the $17 entrée and the cup of coffee for dessert is stuck with the biggest tab while I wind up paying hardly anything. I don’t disagree with the theory, it’s just not a practical matter when you have people like me in your group and I’m beginning to take offense to having to pay more than my share when I can’t afford it.

On the road again...

An email I sent to family & friends around 11 am Thursday:

Hi everyone,

In case you haven’t seen the news, Hurricane Rita is bearing down on Houston and we are leaving town in about 1 hour. We are going to College Station, Texas, which is about 90 miles northwest of here and it is also where Texas A&M Univ. is. We have a place to stay with some friends up there. Personally, I don’t think this is far enough away, but I can’t convince anyone to go elsewhere. I filled up with 33$ in gas this morning, we have lots of supplies/water and enough alcohol to stay pretty buzzed for a few days! I think we took a case of rum and hurricane mix off the shelf. Anyway, I just wanted to let you all know that we should be fine, the cat is coming with us and hopefully my apartment will stay dry. I will have my laptop with me and assuming we have power and a signal to the internet there, I should be able to check my email regularly. I’ll send an update as soon as I can.