elfs | Ze State of Ze Elf

Omaha and I managed to find some time as adults Saturday evening, and so we went out to a lovely dinner at Cedar's restaurant, where the evening weather was so beautiful we ate out on the porch and mused about our lovely life together.

After the dinner we went to Theatersports, a wonderfully funny way to spend your midnight, watching two teams of local actors doing rapid-fire improv challenges, often with suggestions from the audience. One of my favorite was a 30-second scene of "bridesmades talking" redone in three new genres: Shakespeare, Telenovelas, and Samurai warrior flick. They wanted "a recent dramatic moment," and Omaha mentioned almost being clipped by a car, so they re-enacted it, hilariously. (I should mention that at a night ten years ago for one snippet they wanted the name of a painting, and someone shouted "Nudes Descending a Staircase," which the person onstage mis-heard. The resulting scene was screamingly funny, and now you know where Nudes Defending a Staircase came from. See? Ideas are everywhere!) Omaha also went up for the last scene, "Word machine," in which six actors (three from the team, and three from the audience) pretend to be a single person, each allowed to add one word to a sentence. The person they were pretending to be was an expert on Quantum Physics, and an actor from the other team presented the questions. Omaha got the last word of the night, and the funniest: "pants." Everything's funnier with pants! She won best suggestions of the night, earning two free tickets and a pack of candy cigarettes.

Sunday, Omaha was gone all day at some Democratic party thing, so I took the girls out shopping for hardware. It's springtime, and we needed stuff for the garage, new bait and traps for the wasps, and spray for the eaves under the garage where a half-dozen nests are already forming. I also replaced a lot of lightbulbs, fixed the kitchen sink's aerator and the downstairs toilet's ballcock, raked the front yard.

We broke our Braun handmixer, again. This is the third time! We didn't replace it. I bought a Cuisinart instead; metal body construction, and each piece is individually replaceable, unlike the Braun. Highly recommended, and only ten bucks more expensive.

The girls had hot dogs and my experiment was to give each of them five bucks and see how they ordered, since Omaha and I aren't sure if they know how to handle cash. They did fine. Good for them.

Omaha called to tell me to use up the chicken and leftover vegetables. Looking through what I had, the result was Kung Pao Chicken with parsnips, zucchini, snow peas and granny smith apples. It was actually pretty good.

I also made chocolate chip cookies with the girls, but the butter I had was old and the resulting cookies were very, very dry. Still, the girls ate them. Kouryou-chan had a hissy when I said she couldn't do the wet ingredients, which included the sugar, because I knew I couldn't trust her around sugar. But I gave her her own tine from the mixer and all was well.

I discovered Vuze, an app built on top of Azereus, which indexes shows via bittorrent, some of which are crypto'd, some of which you have to buy, and some of which are advertising-supported, and it's just amazing. Addictive stuff. High-def video is sweet.

Went to the gym today. Had a pretty good workout. Solid bagwork. Attached my biomonitor to my gloves and got three points in five minutes. What's the point of that? Mostly upper arms and abs today; I have to do the legwork at home because many of the knee PT stuff I can't do at the gym. Wrong equipment.