Backblogs

Wow, I haven't seen this screen in a while! A couple small things, like the fact that it's been holiday season and I travelled to the West Coast for Christmas (not a good excuse), I had a friend in town for a week at New Year's time (not a good excuse), I no longer have access to Blogger.com at work (relatively not a good excuse), and I've just been really unmotivated at night lately (lack of yoga? Lack of gym? Not sure why). In any case, I'm back for now and need to update the masses on recent events.

First, while it's pre-occupying my mind, I went and saw my mouth surgeon today to talk about the surgery. Not only did I find out that I might possibly have to have three surgeries, but I also learned that my insurance only covers 70% of the first surgery after I pay my deductible ($500). I mean, that's certainly better than nothing, but for some crazy reason I had it in my mind that it was 100% covered. I knew I shoulda called to ask exactly how much they were covering. With the first surgery costing around $12K...well, do the math. Yea, I'm poor. I'm not as worried about this one though. I'm more worried about the surgery(ies) down the road, the major ones that require me to stay in a hospital overnight vs. this couple-of-hours-until-I-wake-up-and-start-popping-Vicadin minor surgery. Oh boy, this is gonna put a dent in my lifestyle....

Speaking of lifestyle, here are a few of the major events from the past month:

1. Just two days after returning from Brazil, D had her birthday and decided she wanted to do dinner at....Churrascaria Plataforma, a Brazilian BBQ restaurant! Talk about crazy coincidence. I found that the meat was better there than at the place we went in Brazil (as it should be for 3x the price!), but the salad bar was much smaller and not nearly as good as down in Fortaleza. For example, the hearts-of-palm were rather mushy rather than solid like they are down in the Southern Hemisphere
2. Cathy and I got invited up to the Bronx to eat at our friend Melissa's place. We have a bit of a dinner circle going on, and she was up for our visit. She has a real nice apartment about a half hour from my apartment via the subway that she paid about $110K to purchase. Two bedroom, full bath, lots of space, view of the city in the distance. Wow, that was enough to make me consider doing something similar - until my meeting with the surgeon today. In any case, she made us chili and rice that was awesome - lots of cilantro and flavor. She did her Mexican roots proud with that meal!
3. At some point last month, I did dinner with Cathy, D, and Cathy's friend Tracy at a fun Italian small-plate restaurant called 'noteca. They had a huge wine collection and amazing, out of the world cheeses to choose from. We also indulged in some Italian tapas that were fantastic. Good stuff, but you better get there early if you want a spot at the corner of Hip and Style St. down in the LES!
4. Since Sean signed up for it as well, I decided to try out match.com again for a month with similar results as the first time I signed up - no winks, no emails, no responses whatsoever with it. I am such a social ditz that it took me three major re-writes before my female friends gave me the thumbs up on my profile. Even some of my foreign friends who signed up as a joke got more winks than I did! And Sean has gotten emails from girls in Russia and Liberia who are looking for greencard-material men in the US :)
5. Cathy, thanks to spending 4+ hours on the phone, got us reservations for one of the hottest places in the city - Nobu. Breathtaking sushi meal that was simply indescribable. I'm gonna take my parents there when they come - if I have any money left :o)
6. Christmas! Christmas is my favorite holiday of the year because, no matter who shows up, it's a very peaceful time at our house. Everyone just gets along so well it seems, and this year was no exception even with ~547 people staying at our house. I spent four quality days in town with my family and cherished it all. We had a huge Christmas Eve crab feed (my dad got up to Palo Alto at 6:15am on Saturday to buy crab at Fish Market's half price only to find out they sold out already since they only got 1/10th of their order from their supplier), tons of food on Sunday (lamb, a steel-cut oatmeal breakfast, and tons of other stuff), tons more food on Monday (Christmas day #2 at Grandma Georgia's with my dad's half of the family), and then a Mongolian BBQ for my sister's birthday on Tuesday before I flew home.
7. I got an older PowerMac from my brother that is tons of fun to play with. I've already dropped too much cash into making it compatible and will drop some more to get it up to snuff. Anyone wanna buy my Dell PC??
   
8. My college roommate Ryan came out for a week the day I got home from California for New Year's Eve and to check out the city. He ran me ragged over town as we spent some time in pretty much every neighborhood. I finally tried out a hole-in-the-wall French place called Zucco: Le French Diner, which prides itself on serving French food that you would find at a French trucker's stop in a teeny, tiny restaurant that fits about 15 people . Zucco, the owner, was quite a character. He smoked about a whole pack of cigarettes outside while we ate and looked all grisly with his black beard and baseball hat and the cut-off leather gloves on his hands. But he had some great food! For New Year's, we went downtown and did a pub crawl around to some places that weren't charging entrance. Poor Paul was sick so he couldn't join us. But we found some new places that were fun and I did some dancing, swinging and twirling the girls :o).
   

So, that brings me roughly up to today. I just made some lentil soup - enough to feed me for a month - and brought Paul and Cathy over for a meal. They are leaving to live in Cyprus for an internal project at Cathy's company - all expenses paid of course - on Thursday, so there's going to be a big party for them tomorrow night at D's house. Should be fun!

Justinho, yes I did get Vicadin prescriptions for next Wednesday's adventure :o)