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!
