Oh Yeah! I Have a Blog!

Fun Fact: Dark roast coffees actually have less caffeine than lighter roasts.

 

Last we left our heroes they had just traveled 3,000 miles back to Rhode Island to watch the Bruins lose in spectacular fashion so that’s where I’ll pick it up!  Hello everyone, Jeff here.  lots has happened in the last three months since I last posted a blog – it’s been tax season and although I don’t do taxes I get the benefit of working 1,000 hour weeks still J.  For those kids or parents reading at home tell your kids to practice hitting a curve ball instead of reading books.

 

Anyway, I guess since I already made a bruins reference I’ll work backwards on this post.  Also my memory isn’t too great so we’ll see how much of the last two months I can recall at the moment.  This past weekend was St Patty’s day weekend and although we didn’t go to the parade in Newport (RI) like we did those couple years before we became accountants, we still managed to enjoy some festivities.  The Bruins made their annual west coast swing so they played games on Friday night in Anaheim (against Coach Bombay and the Mighty Ducks) and Saturday night against Quasimodo and the Kings.

 

Quasimodo sporting a fine black tunic ahead of his match with some bears.

 

In September when tickets went on sale we couldn’t resist buying them to see the Bruins in Anaheim but as last week rolled along I couldn’t help but try to convince Carissa to let me get tickets to the Kings as well.  We ended up going to both games and they were a blast but unfortunately the flying V and non-stop quack chants rattled the Bruins to a 4-0 loss against the ducks and the Kings protected the castle and the Bruins lost again 2-1 making it two consecutive years where they went 0 for 3 on their west coast swing (they lost in San Jose on Monday of last week).  That concludes this week’s sports talk.  Tune in later in the blog when I remember that the super bowl also happened in the last two months and the sports talk actually continues briefly!

 

So the week before I traded Saturday in the office for Sunday in the office and we took a trip down to a beer fest in San Diego.  It was a beautiful sunny and 75 degrees (obviously… because that’s all San Diego ever is) and the beer fest was right on the water next to multi-million dollar yachts.  Carissa can explain the yachts better than I can though.

 

As Carissa pointed out above, this boat not only has a boat on it but also has a helicopter (sans blades) on the top deck.  It was quite an impressive sight to see.
(It's almost like you can't even tell this was recorded after a beer fest)

 

The beer fest ran from around 1-4, there were food trucks where I got bacon wrapped mac and cheese bites (almost brother’s competition quality) and we went out on the town after for a few hours before returning home and sleeping off a long day… before I had to wake up and drag my dead body into work because that’s what champions do… they drink too much and go to work the next day anyway!

 

Thursday March 10^th was the celebration of the day I was born 26 short years ago!  As always I celebrated the only way I know how – by going to work!  Luckily the manager I was working with found out it was my birthday around 3pm and felt bad about not knowing all day so he told me to leave at 5pm (instead of the more traditional 9pm that I had been working until the rest of that week).  So Carissa and I went out to a lovely dinner where I ate steak and drank some chardonnay!  Then we came home and watched Straight Outta Compton.  It was good but the most interesting part of the whole thing is that they just painted Eazy-E as a complete dingus (PG rated language alert) which is interesting because he’s now dead and couldn’t really add anything to the story.  Who knows? Maybe he was a dingus?  Either way – good movie.

 

So working our way back chronologically, I don’t remember anything else that happened between Super Bowl Sunday and my birthday so let’s go there!  Going into that weekend we were already into the swing of busy season and working too many hours including Saturdays (and by “we”, I mean “I” Carissa managed to find a diamond in the rough (the Aladdin of accounting firms if you will) where she doesn’t have to work overtime during winter).  So checking the weather report we noticed it was going to be nice on Super Bowl weekend and we decided to go to the beach.  In February.  On Super Bowl Sunday.  It was in the low 80s and it was amazing just to be at the beach hanging out… after all it’s one of the only times we really “celebrated” the fact that we moved to California.  We hung out there for most of the day then we watched Peyton Manning do his best to lose to the Panthers only to be bailed out by his defense.  But after a Broncos win and a Peyton doing a little advertising for Papa John and Budweiser the night went on.  The cool thing about the west coast is that big games like that usually end around 10pm so you don’t have to feel like a zombie the next day!  Although you still do because it’s the Super Bowl.  That concludes our sports talk for today, stay tuned for more interesting topics!

 

So arguably the most exciting thing that happened in the last two months (and in all honesty about 75% of the reason we packed everything and moved to California) was that we went to be in the audience of The Price Is Right!  So basically this should have been an entire blog in itself but I f’d up and I apologize.  I also can’t give away any spoilers because I signed an official looking piece of paper that a perused beforehand and said I shouldn’t or Bob Barker would kick my ass.  So basically all of their filming is done during the week but we (Carissa) found a rare Sunday filming and we (Carissa) got tickets for us!  The tickets said there was a morning and an afternoon filming so we chose the afternoon which meant we were supposed to be there by noon.  So in order to make sure we were there on time for what we thought was a noon filming we got there at like 10:30am.  What we did not know however is that they wanted us there at noon for the pre-show stuff.  What this means is that they have to take everybody’s information and SSN and everything to make sure you don’t make a living trying to get onto The Price Is Right (unfortunately).  So for about 4 hours we did everything from filling out some paperwork, to waiting in line, to getting our official TPIR nametags, to getting our picture, to getting interviewed in a group of about 25 at a time to see if you’ll be worthy enough to go up and be on contestant row.  Basically it was a long process that was totally worth it because we got to go inside the Bob Barker Sound Stage!  So *Spoiler Alert* neither of us got selected, I think the guy liked me during the interview because he talked to me for a bit longer than other people but as soon as I said I was an accountant (like an idiot) I knew that was the nail in my coffin.  TPIR is looking for an average joe, not somebody who makes them pay taxes (is that what people think accountants do?).  Anyway lesson learned and next time I go to a filming I am telling them I’m a plumber or a student or something.  Going inside the sound stage was pretty amazing, we got to see Drew Carey; he told a lot of dirty jokes during the commercial breaks.  We got to see some people win some games and some people lose some games.  Probably the funniest “crowd” experience I had was there was a game where there were 5 numbers in a row in the price of whatever and it was like 47512.  The goal of the game was to pull out either the 7, 5, or 1 to get the actual price of whatever it was.  So the girl next to us (who didn’t know the contestant) was screaming, SCREAMING 1 over and over.  Louder than anybody else in the audience it seemed and I figured I wanted to take a stab at it too, why not right? So I yell 7.  IMMEDIATELY after I yell 7 (thinking I’m helping the person playing the game) the girl yelling 1 whips around and yells “NO!” at me as if I was stabbing her cat.  At that point I was like ok fine 1! 1! And it turns out the answer was 1 and that girl was spot on so I just followed what she said on every game after that (except one where I was right and it was awesome – she was actually right on like 95% of the games so it sucks for her that she didn’t get called up… she obviously did some research beforehand).  Speaking of research, they told us multiple times before we went in that we couldn’t bring phones (obviously) or price listings which I thought was funny.  Like you just print out a list of prices of everything you can think of just in case anybody you know gets called up so you can help.  Everything from Toyota Camry to Flintstones vitamins just to be safe.  Stroll on in with an alphabetized ream of price lists.  Anyway… thought that was funny that they specified it multiple times.  All and all I have not given up on my dream to meet Drew Carey, call him Bob, have nobody anywhere find it funny but me, and ultimately do something stupid to lose it all.  The episode we were on is airing on April 26^th and we are in the second row behind the contestants so you will absolutely see us!  After busy season is over we will work on getting on TV more so you can all see us more – our goal for the next show we go watch is Who’s Line Is It Anyway (we are doing a Drew Carey tour).

 

I think that’s the high points for the last three-ish months.  We will do our best to do more interesting things to blog about and I will do my best to remember them and to remember to blog about them!  Until next time – have a great day!

 

May your poops be plentiful! (and you thought I forgot my closing line).

RI and the Winter Classic!

Editor’s note: wrote this on Sunday and forgot to post it so some of the “today” stuff is misleading… think of today as Sunday.  Also I didn’t send myself any pictures from my phone so the pictures from the winter classic will be forthcoming.

Fun Fact: Eating too much food can lead to tummy aches

This is another two weeker, mostly because I was home for the first week of the two weeker.  This post starts out back in the year 2015 - a year that was divisible by 5 AND 403 (probably other numbers too but I couldn’t find any in my brief long division).  So the last week of 2015 was uneventful for the most part.  I don’t remember what happened but from what I can recall we solved the case of the missing house keys and ate a pizza.  On Wednesday afternoon we left work with one thing on our mind… we were going back to RI.

We drove to LA after work and were parked, shuttled, and through security around 8pm.  Our flight was at 10:50 so we did what anybody would do and hit the airport bar.  My strategy was to have a couple beers so I could fall asleep as soon as I got on the plane.  This being our first time flying on Virgin Airlines, we did not really know what to expect but we were told it was a great airline.  We got on the plane and immediately saw a difference between that and southwest (which we usually fly but on this occasion was not less expensive).  Virgin had mood lighting which I’m guessing probably started as a way for people to feel less frustrated by the people in front of them who seem to be challenged by the overhead bins and continued because it worked.  I don’t know if it was because of the mood lights or the calming music but I was already happier when I got on board… take notice other air lines.

So anyway we got to our seats and since we booked this flight a little later than we wanted to (I didn’t know if I would have the next day off or not) we got two aisle seats one behind the other (so I was sitting in the aisle seat in front of Carissa).  Once we got to our seats we immediately noticed that they were slightly wider than southwest’s seats and that there was a few more inches of leg room… both obviously good things when taking an overnight flight.  The coolest part of Virgin Airlines is they have an awesome rap of the safety instructions that has a video and everything before takeoff!  I was happy that my plan was working and I fell asleep only to be awoken by Carissa hitting me in the head with a nip of sailor jerry (the small bottles that are like 1oz or whatever that they serve on airplanes… somebody told me this week that they didn’t know they were called nips so I figured I’d elaborate in case anybody else felt the same confusion).  I never really fell back asleep after that so I watched the TV that was on the back of the seat in front of me and watched the lady next to me struggle to play solitaire on her ipad.  She made me furious because she was terrible at it but in her defense she probably isn’t used to playing on overnight flights with a very critical audience.

Our flight took off from LAX at 10:50pm pacific time and landed in Boston at 5:30am Eastern time.  I don’t know how that math works and I haven’t tried to figure it out but I think we hit a time warp because that flight was WAY shorter than I thought it would be.  Anyway we left the airport and headed towards south station in Boston to catch the 6:20 train to Providence.  We made it with about 5 minutes to spare and Carissa’s mommy picked us up in Providence to take us back to her house to wait for Wein-o-rama to start serving lunch.

Wein-o-rama if you don’t know (I feel like this blog may have more Californian readers since I saw most of the RI audience last week… all 3 of you) is an old fashioned diner that opened in 1962 and specializes in making delicious hot wieners.  A wiener is like if the best tasting hot dog you ever had cloned itself and had a baby hot dog (like a pig in a blanket) that was twice as delicious and grew up to be even more delicious than when it was born.  It’s slightly smaller than a traditional ball park frank and comes on a steamed bun.  If you get one “all the way” you’re looking at steamed bun, wiener, mustard, meat sauce, onion, and celery salt.  I don’t know why this culinary delicacy only exists in Rhode Island (someone once told me it was because RI has more lenient health laws… but that can’t be the reason can it?) but I think the other 49 states need to get their shit together because wieners are the best.  After a healthy breakfast of two eggs, home fries, toast and 3 no mustard (yeah I get em with no mustahd, big whoop, wanna fight about it (say it with a really Rhode Island/Italian accent)) we headed out to go see momma DeLuca because she had been feeding me some garbage about missing us… I see through your clever façade mother.  When I got home we all hugged and kissed and played a quick game of how confused can you make your mother in a 10 minute conversation before we stole her car to go meet some friends for lunch.

After we left lunch we went to the AT&T store to get new phones!  I had been due for an upgrade for about a year so I figured there was no time like the present!  Due to some technical difficulties on transferring Carissa’s pictures and stuff so it took about 3 hours to get new phones but at least I got to watch the whole Winter Classic Alumni Game in the process.  Afterwards we went to Sam and Chris’s new House and hung out for some New Year’s festivities.  We went to bed around 2am and woke up at 7am (so we were working on roughly 7 hours of sleep total over two nights) to drive up to North Smithfield to reunite the Brothers and prepare for the Winter Classic!

When we got there Bob was finishing packing the car and Liz was inside putting some finishing touches on the last few things we were bringing.  To say that they won at tailgating would be an understatement.  I knew that they would do a good job but they far surpassed any expectations I could have ever had.  They brought small presents for us to open (essentially like a party favor bag that you would get when you were like 7 and at a friend’s birthday party - only these had scratch tickets and shots of tequila) they brought a queso dip that was good enough to kill for.  They brought bacon and eggs to cook before the game as well as chicken and skewers to cook after the game while we were waiting for traffic to clear out.  They also had premixed hot chocolate with Dr. McGillicuddy as well as many beers for shotgunning and consuming in the conventional fashion.  We made friends with some of the Canadian fans that were nearby.  Although we offered them food before and after the game we made it clear to them that we were not friends while the game was happening - a trade off they gladly accepted because the queso dip was that good.  We also made them shotgun beers with us which was a lot of fun.  The winter classic was overall an amazing experience even though the Bruins appeared to really only try for about 10 out of 60 minutes.  I think the sun was in their eyes for the other 50 minutes… which is probably why they play inside for the other 81 games.

That night we hung out in North Smithfield and the following night we had a family dinner in Cranston before having brunch on Sunday and heading back up to Boston by train to fly back to LAX that afternoon.  We had a lot of fun back in RI and I think we did an effective job of yelling at everybody to come visit us… COME VISIT US!

This week we took a trial run at a new cooking website we signed up for.  It’s called Cook Smarts and you basically pay like $8 a month to get 4 recipes a week and take all the thinking out of making dinner.  It tries to make all 4 meals have similar ingredients that you can prep earlier in the week if you want and pretty much just makes life a little easier if you’re like us and say “what do you want to have for dinner tonight?  I don’t know…. Want to go out?  No not really but I don’t know what to cook” every night of the week.

Other than that we didn’t really do much this week.  So I guess this is really just a 1 week late blog instead of being a two week blog.  The only thing I can really add is I’m sorry to all of the Viking fans out there.  If you missed the game but saw Ace Ventura: Pet Detective let’s just say Blair Walsh is the new Ray Finkle.  LACES OUT!  If you didn’t see the game or that movie than you are probably leading a more interesting life than I am.  Next week we will probably do more interesting things but we also might start getting really busy at work so we’ll see.  We bought Powerball tickets so hopefully we can afford to not work so much in the future.  The place we bought it had a sign that just said 999 million because they couldn’t get it to go up past a billion… which is insane.  Imagine how many boats you could buy with a billion dollars...  A lot of boats… or one REALLY big boat.  I hope you all have a great week and may your poops be plentiful!