Very good weekend. We were waaaay social. Like we actually talked to other people. And hung out with them! I’m sure they’ll never call us again.
We actually went out Friday night for dinner, Saturday afternoon for drinks and cornhole, and Sunday we went to a vineyard for the afternoon, just the two of us. We also battled squirrels and planted our THIRD tomato plant of the season. At this rate, we’ll have tomatoes by August. And, we now have the trashiest, most metally front yard ever.
Great French bistro, amazing foie gras with figs.Desert wine. Why not?Our roses.Cornhole at the Rock n Roll Hotel. Man, I suck at that game. I think the score was like 102 to 16
Hefweizzen at the wonderfully named Star of Shamrock (Jewish – Irish place).
Tomahawk steak for dinner (brontosaurus size)Since it was a large 2-pounder, we could cook it nice and slow and get a really good crust on it. Probably the best steak ever.Winery humor. Bought a couple of bottles of white, including a bottle we sat on the winery patio and enjoyed. The weather was PERFECT.So, we’re still having problems with tomato vandalism. We’re sure it’s squirrels. I wanted to give up, but XFE is personally peeved, so this is how we’re dealing with it. We planted some more items today and then created these metal thunderdomes. Bring it, stupid squirrels.
I signed up for this race about two months ago. I thought it was on Sunday, but while ironing on Saturday, I saw a commercial for a new show starting on Monday, April 30. I thought to myself, “no, Monday’s May 1,” but when I went and checked, I saw that it was actually the 28th and I had missed the race. Awesome. I swear, i’m not signing up for another race again.
Some boar chops from Steve the butcher. We had Matt and Melissa over on Saturday night and made dinner.
We made wild mushroom risotto. Luckily, I’m not too embarrassed to put up a shit-eating grin photo. This is literally the only help I provided the whole meal.
All together now, boar, risotto, asparagus.
And then we noticed that our tomato plant had been vandalized. We think a squirrel is messing with us.
End of weekend drink. We went to Brabo (down the street from our house) hoping to take advantage of their happy hour deal (mussels, frites and wine for $15) but they were actually out of mussels. Bummer.
Dessert in the dark. Berries with whipped cream and dark chocolate squares.
You know what chaps my hide? I mean, besides plant vandalism, of which I was a victim this week.
Not even sure that sentence is properly constructed.
Anyway, I’ll get to the real point of my post in just a second, but first I want to yell for a minute about the lame thugs of Old Town who tore all the leaves off my newly planted banana pepper plant.
A leaf-less banana pepper plant. Now what will I put on my pizzas?
Who does this? And why? And why stop just there? We also have a lovely and tender new Roma tomato plant just waiting to grow and fill its’ metal tomato cage. And what about my jalapeno plant? Why not just rip it out like you did my heart? Don’t even get me started on the herbs. But I suppose this vandal was too damn scared to walk up into the walkway and tear at the leaves of my mint and basil. The rosemary is far too scary, since it’s protected by the very thorny rose bush.
No, you just stood by the little garden box in front of our house and adjacent to the sidewalk and picked the leaves off my banana pepper. Did you know that we’ve never tried to grow banana peppers and we were so excited to see if we’d be any good at it? But no. You were probably standing around, talking to another one of your thuggy friends and needed something to do with your hands. Ugh. It really has made me so very, very sad.
The scene of the crime. Sideways, I think. I don't know. I was very distraught and it was early.
RIP banana pepper. Or, better yet, fight. Prove us all wrong and fight your way back.
OK, now that that’s out of the way (I really didn’t expect to get so emotional on that). We at the XFE-PoeLog abode love us a little show called Storage Wars on A&E. Actually, we love both the original and the Texas edition. I can’t exactly even say which one I love better. I love them both equally.
But one thing that really confounds me is Dave Hester’s pricing. Dave, if you don’t watch the show, is kind of the resident jerk. He’s a teensy bit evil. He likes to run up other bidders just for the fun of it. He’s got a huge ego, and he wears a black shirt and hat, and likes to smirk a lot. He’s like the NeNe of the Storage Wars world – he’s loud, and conniving and confrontational, and annoying as all get out, but the show would be a lot less fun without him.
Don't worry, I am rich. Very, very rich. Dave Hester rich, in fact.
When Dave starts going through a storage locker and pricing the items for what he thinks they’ll sell for in his shop or auction house, he seems to just be pulling some very large prices out of thin air.
We were watching an old episode from season two last night in which Dave bought a unit that hadn’t been touched in 20 years. In it, he found a trunk that had some Italian travel stickers on it. Inside the trunk were a whole bunch of cheap disposable Christmas ornaments. Bummer. But in a nearby box, he finds a whole bunch of really tacky old yellowing lace curtains. Putting zero and nothing together, Dave surmises that these are in fact rare lace pieces made in Murano by blind nuns or something, and therefore are worth about $1,000.
Bull. Malarky. This guy overprices EVERYTHING. There was another episode where he found some old decrepit fur coats and declared he was going to get $200 a piece for them. Another time he found two guitars and said he could get $600 a piece for them. He inflates the value of every single item just so it looks like he’s made a profit, no matter what.
That’s way more annoying than him driving up the prices or making last minute bids.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he does sell that stuff for the prices he quotes. According to the Storage Wars Wikipedia page, Dave has made a profit of $3.26 for every dollar he’s spent over the first two seasons of the show, far outpacing anyone else.
Also, as long as I have your attention, producers, how about a little accountability? If I have to watch Darrell look at an old Xbox and say, “That’s a 50 dollar bill” one more time, I’m going to throw my remote control through my television.
Maybe Dave has some sort of banana pepper alarm system he could sell me for a couple of thousand dollars.
