Today, lunch was shared with my boss and a colleage at Texas de Brazil. You have a salad bar and then the gauchos bring you meat. Lots of it. All kinds: several kinds of beef and steak, chicken, pork, lamb and sausage. Yum! The gauchos are strolling waiters who wander around carrying skewers of meat. You have a coaster on your table that is red on one side (stop) and green on the other (go). If you have green facing up, each gaucho will stop by your table to offer whatever meat he is carrying. Let’s say it’s lamb. Well, I don’t care for lamb, so I say “no thanks.” Then another one comes by, and he might have sausage. Well, I’ve already got some sausage on my plate, so I say “no thanks.” Then another comes by with steak, so I say “yes, please.” He slices a piece of meat off the skewer and you grab it with little tongs each person has as part of their place setting.
Pleasant Company
Today was a day with some very pleasant company. I had lunch with my dear friend and former Chubb colleage, Gary. We meet for lunch every so often and it’s always a marathon – about 2 hours. And it’s not enough time for us to talk about all the things we want to say. We (and our partners) are having dinner next Wednesday, so I’m already looking forward to that. As a bonus, he went with me about 5 blocks from the restaurant to get a quick geocache! It was a beautiful day – sunny and cloudless and 80 🙂
Tonight Bobby and Ian came over for dinner and a nice chat. I had to run by the store so I was a little late but fortunately James had already started dinner, so that went quickly. I made chocolate-chip cookies to make up for it. They turned out a bit thinner and crispier than usual but still yummy. Bobby and I were discussing how nice it is that despite having just spent 3 days with each other in fairly close quarters, we are still wanting to do dinners and now we are already thinking about another trip in the fall. We really do get on well and are more like family than anything else. Thanks for coming over, my brothahs!
Campin’
The Eaglebend Lane crew has just returned from a weekend of “camping.” Understand that what this means is that we rented a cabin in the woods. In this cabin are beds, sheets, a shower, a fireplace, a refrigerator, a microwave, a stove and oven, a sink, etc.
We also dragged along 3 iPods and a set of speakers for them, a Sirius satellite radio and jam box, 2 GPS units, at least one Palm Pilot. I didn’t see a laptop computer, but there might have been one. We all had cell phones but no service. I like it that way 🙂 Music is important, phones are not.
But, it’s a tremendous amount of fun. We went to Beaver’s Bend State Park in SE Oklahoma. We reserved our cabin about 5 months ago so there has been a bit of build-up. It did not disappoint. We all had Good Friday off, so we left after work on Thursday and got there about midnight. We got up at a reasonable hour on Friday, had a fantastic breakfast (I love the smells of coffee and bacon out in the woods) and set off to hike. We probably walked about 5 miles in total and spent most of the day outside. The dogs had a great time roaming around and playing with Bobby & Ian’s dogs. More details of our trip are at James’ blog.
Birthday
It’s my birthday – not for play-play but for real-real!
I wasn’t going to be so self-serving as to post a comment about that, but James let the cat out of the bag on his blog, so now it’s official – for the first time in a year, I’m older today than I was yesterday. Wait a minute…
Need Your Confidence in a Most Urgent Matter
Anyone else get sick of those Nigerian scam emails? You know, the ones from the Minister of Petroleum in Nigeria who happens to have $24 million in a foreign account that he urgently needs your confident help in to get it back to Nigeria? Thank god he stumbled onto your trustworthy free E-mail account!
Anyway, there is a site called 419eater.com that takes the perpetrators of this fraud to task. 419 refers to the Nigerian law meant to combat this scam industry. Some guy got bored and decided to monkey with the person on the sending end of those emails. The site does a good job of explaining why and how they do what they do. The funniest part is called “The Trophy Room.” They have gotten these scammers to take photos of themselves and send by e-mail. The guys scamming (“baiting”) the scammers always ask for them to hold a sign or object to “prove” that the photo is of that person. The Trophy Room is a collection of alleged scammers holding signs that say pretty ridiculous things on them (since the scammers don’t really speak English or grasp our culture, it works brilliantly).
Ready to Roll
James gave me a GPS unit for my birthday. It’s just like the one I was borrowing (for 3 mos) from Brian. But it’s mine, and I can customize it how I like. So now it has flames on the side! (j/k)
It has all the hardware and cables to connect it to the PC, which I didn’t have before. James also gave me some really cool mapping software to put on it, because the basic GPS comes with only the major highways & geographic features. But I want Eaglebend Lane on there, so, y’know. I had difficulty installing the map software, so that will have to wait – prolly need to clear my registry, because it bombed on the install and now won’t reinstall properly. Yes, I’ve already tried uninstalling it. 😉