This past weekend we celebrated New Years with a couple friends of ours who had come up to spend a few days at our house. I had Thursday and Friday off from work to entertain them while Michael worked.
Kevin brought up a couple growlers from his local brewery, Four Sons Brewery, filled with their Pale Ale and Amber Ale. Both were enjoyable and full of character, and contrary to my normal stance on Pale vs. Amber I enjoyed the Amber ale more. He left us one of the empty growlers to keep – woohoo!
While Michael was at work on Friday I took the guys out to Max & Ermas in Oaks. The food was good, but the service was lousy – very unusual for that location! The waiter started off fine, one of those jump-on-your-table-and-be-too-excited types, but then he turned horrible. He neglected to check on us after our food was delivered by someone else and I sat for almost 15 minutes with an empty soda glass. He pretty much ignored us while we were eating after I finally got my soda refilled. Then he brought the fresh cookies for dessert too early, before Kevin was finished with his meal. And then without asking if we wanted more he brought the check, which was our signal to get out rather than ordering a couple beers to round out the meal, fine! It was about 3 in the afternoon and there wasn’t a lack of available tables in the place, so he wasn’t trying to clear us out for other diners. He got a lousy tip, which is really a shame for him, since I’m a great tipper.
Unfortunately Michael started coming down with the flu Friday afternoon at work. Saturday he was not feeling well, but was feeling good enough to decline my offer to drive and drive us all himself to Victory Brewing Company for a late lunch and tour of the brewery! We met up with Bob and a couple friends of his at the Brewery and had a blast during the tour.
Throughout the weekend Kevin and I were plopped in front of the TV (or his laptop screen) watching I, Claudius, a 12 hour BBC mini-series from 1976. I am not sure what I was expecting from this – but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it! This wasn’t some lousy made-for-TV movie, this was a well-structured film with some notable actors: John Hurt as Caligula, Patrick Stewart as Sejanus, Sian Phillips (Rev. Mother in Dune) as Livia, John Rhys-Davies as Marco. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy watching the excess and absurdity of Caligula, as if I needed re-enforcement of the idea that I should name a cat after such a fellow (What? Cats are excessive and absurd!).
It was also interesting to be able to follow the historical accuracy of the film by referencing the I, Claudius Project:
The goal of the I, CLAVDIVS PROJECT is to create a web resource which provides source materials and analyses for the BBC production of I, Claudius. Each episode is documented to show what is supported by ancient evidence or by the Graves novels and what is not.
The project has been going on since 1998 and is still in progress, as is evident from the detail of the documentation in the earlier episodes in relation to the later ones. Still – what a fantastic resource!
We also got to watch the 4th season (and a few episodes of other seasons) of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! which was a nice bit of libertarian blabbering that I thoroughly enjoyed and mostly agreed with. Plus both Kevin and I are big Penn fans (he a bit more than I) and during a week without Penn Radio we needed some sort of Penn fix.
New Years Eve was spent enjoying growlers from Victory, various movies and shows on the MythTV box, and just hanging out together. Michael (still suffering from the flu) made pizzas for all of us, with me helping out chopping up things for the pizzas and running around doing little tasks so he wouldn’t have such a huge burden. The pizzas turned out great and we ended the evening with way too much leftover cheese and snacks.
New years day was spent “recovering” from the night before. Michael was finally starting to feel better (yay!) and we decided to head out to Sly Fox for some food around 5PM – but they were closed. I had called earlier to make sure they were open, and they had indicated that they would probably close earlier than the normal 9PM, but didn’t think they’d close before dinner. Sigh. We ended up just going home and having some veggie burgers, fries and leftover snacky foods. In retrospect this was probably the best plan of action, if we had ended up at Sly Fox I’m sure we would have brought home more beer, stayed up late and I would have been feeling miserable this morning. As it was, I was able to get to bed by 9 to read and was asleep by 10.
This morning the guys left and I went back to work.