San Diego and "Authentic" Mexican

Knock Knock!

Who's there?

Blog Post.

Blog Post who?

What do you mean "blog post who?" there's a blog post at the door.  Open the door if you are interested in this blog post!

I think I’m onto something with that opening… So I last told you about my experience with time zones.  They are pretty crazy!  But Sunday brought the best gift so far… the gift of brunch and Tom Brady (this was the first 1pm Eastern Time aka 10am Pacific Time game the patriots had played since we moved here).  The patriots played the Jets and I got to go get brunch while Carissa was at yoga.  A few beers and a few close plays later (much to the chagrin of the Patriots haters in the bar) the Jets ran out of time on their final drive and the Pats won.  Nothing better than eating “The Hangover Burger”, enjoying some breakfast beers, and watching Tom Brady!  For those who are curious the hangover burger is a cheeseburger with bacon and a fried egg - something about it made it taste better than just that though. 

Which actually reminds me - I know this whole blog is supposed to be about our West Coast escapades but I’d like to bring something up here.  This isn’t the exact article I read but it was the one I found most quickly with a Google search: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/world-health-organization-processed-meats-cause-cancer_562e1144e4b0aac0b8fd51b2 So apparently The Who decided that eating processed meats is as bad as smoking cigarettes.  Let’s take a second to process this information.  I have a few points here - 1) nobody was under the impression that adding bacon to anything was healthy and I don’t think anybody really thought they were doing themselves a favor by eating it. B) Is there anything else left that doesn’t cause cancer?  So now eating burgers, bacon, hot dogs, sausage, etc. is going to kill me as fast as cigarettes?  Which actually raises an interesting point in my mind - let’s compare one slice of bacon to one cigarette (for argument’s sake).  Smoking a pack a day is 20 cigs I believe.  If you smoke one pack chances are you haven’t done a ton of damage, it’s the whole pack-a-day for 30 years thing that gets people into trouble.  Let’s replace cigs in this example with processed meats.  If you're eating 20 slices of bacon a day for 30 years I think the heart disease would kill you before the cancer did.  I wanted to go on more of a rant here but then I made that connection and I’m not rewriting this paragraph so sorry.  Saw an article similar to the one above first thing Monday morning and it got me going a little bit.  Also Joey Chestnut is as good as dead…

So back to West Coast antics - on Sunday we signed up to be members at Costco.  Costco is a wonderful place like BJ’s or Sam’s Club but slightly larger and with an entire section full of inexpensive alcohol.  We signed up on Sunday but after seeing the mess that was the store, we left after about 5 minutes to return on Monday.  Afterwards, I took a trip to Sports Authority to buy some cleats (they are way too flashy but they were also the least expensive option) and went to a Frisbee meetup game.  For those unfamiliar, meetup.com is a website for people who want to do anything really with other people.  My best guess is it was started for pickup sports games but now it has pretty much anything ever you’d want to do with other people… I’m pretty sure there’s even like book clubs and stuff on meetup.  Either way I went to Frisbee and played for a couple hours - a good time was had by all and I probably have a new Sunday hobby (provided it doesn’t interfere with watching football).

Monday we went back to Costco and did a little shopping.  I won’t really elaborate because if you find me talking about grocery shopping interesting than I think you might be a little bit too interested in what’s going on in my life (sorry mom).  After Costco we went to a restaurant on our road called Taco Mesa.  It was voted the best taco’s in Orange County in 2012 & 2013 so naturally when I got there I cracked under the pressure of looking at the menu and I did not get tacos!  I guess I have a reason to go back now aside from the fact that what I got was delicious.  So what I DID get was called a Chile Relleno.  It was basically mozzarella stick only instead of deep frying the mozzarella they put cheese (probably not mozzarella) inside a poblano pepper and cook it in a pan then deep fry it a little at the end?  There also might have been a few other things inside the pepper but either way it was delicious and pretty big too.  Carissa got a quesadilla and she said it was also yummy so when you people finally come visit us we will take you there.

I tried to start taking notes so I could remember what I do from day to day and so far it is not going so well.  Either that or I seriously didn’t do anything on Tuesday except for go to work (which is entirely possible - I think I might have actually worked late then come home and made burgers - suck it WHO).  Wednesday was a little more interesting!  I went to San Diego to do an inventory count.  It was so close to Mexico that the guy who works there said the DEA found 3 tunnels last year that were built by the cartel for transporting drugs across the country.  This is how close it was!

The circle on the map is the San Diego warehouse and the line is the border between the U.S. and Mexico.  So yeah, like two streets over.  This client also had a warehouse in Tijuana, Mexico.  I was asked on Monday if I wanted to go over the border for lunch to get tacos.  Like authentic Mexican tacos - from Mexico!  Obviously i said I did and I showed up with my passport ready.  Unfortunately things did not go according to plan and I ended up staying in San Diego while the person who asked me if I wanted to go get tacos went to the Tijuana warehouse to do the count.  Then the manager who went to Tijuana with her brought me back a chicken quesadilla for lunch.  Here it is ladies and gents!  An “authentic” Mexican Chicken Quesadilla!

I know… it tasted even better than it looked!  All jokes aside it was pretty good albeit very plain but there will be other opportunities I suppose.

Thursday the Patriots played and I went to the bar to watch them with Carissa and a couple guys from work around 5:45ish.  Nothing too special about that except the Patriots killing it and that our waitress was from New Hampshire.  We just keep meeting people from New England!  On Friday I actually found out that somebody who works with me actually grew up in Cranston and graduated from Cranston West before moving to California after high school.  Again, I don’t know how this keeps happening but I’m becoming more and more convinced that my life is a TV show.  Friday we wore costumes to work - I wore a Hawaiian shirt and a bucket hat so I guess I just dressed down and wore what I usually would wear.

As you can see I looked great.  Friday night we went out with some people I work with to a place that looked like it was built in the 70s and not updated since.  It was totally the kind of place you could picture people doing coke off the piano.  This is a picture of what the sign looked like and you make the call for yourself.

It was called Bistango.  I don’t know how I felt about it but I think if somebody wants to know what Southern California was like 20-30 years ago that’s a good place to start.  Saturday we pretty much just hung out for most of the day - drove around and ran some errands.  At night we went to a bar around the corner for their Halloween party.  Nothing too spectacular to report from there except there was an actual little person dressed as an oompa loompa.  It was pretty amazing.  Carissa posted a picture on Facebook if you're interested in what he looked like.

Today (Sunday) was the beginning of an exercise contest at work called the “fit-bit Challenge” basically we all got fancy pedometers (if we paid the subsidized fee - they didn’t buy thousands of fitbits for everybody) so I walked my ass off and right now I’m at about 27,000 steps with a few hours to go on day one.  For those that don’t track such random statistics a normal weekend day is probably 10-12k steps?  Obviously this depends on your activity level.  So we walked about a mile to breakfast, then I played Frisbee for about 3 hours, then I walked another mile or so each way to go sign up for the 24 hour gym around me.  Not to mention the fact that I had about 8k before I went to bed from rockin out on the dance floor between midnight and 2am (and the walk home from the bar and whatnot).  Either way this pace can’t stay like this or I might die.  But it has been fun!  My parting note today is that we finally started watching The Wire on Amazon Prime (originally on HBO like 10 years ago) and it’s a great show.  It’s about the drug trade in Baltimore and apparently its one of the best shows ever made based on its reviews.  Not sure what’s on the docket for this week but hopefully I can stir up something interesting!  OH the other big thing is we booked a trip to Vegas over Thanksgiving!  We got a room at the Luxor hotel from Wednesday night until Sunday if anybody cares to join us!